Bioactivity sparks a new era in nutrition science
By Joseph O’Donnell
We are in a new era of nutrition science. The notion of food as bioactive (a substance that has an effect on living tissue) has taken root and become the focus of marketing and research and development efforts around the globe.
The concept of things going into your mouth in order to deliver some specific health or other benefit (e.g., increased sexual prowess) is old hat to some cultures but for Americans it’s a revolution of a sort. In some cultures, especially in East Asia where relief from an ailment or enhancement of a physical or behavioral trait is often coupled with a lack of resources to conduct thorough scientific experiments, treatments are often based on testimonials. To the average Western scientific mind, testimonials have little value and are only placebos for the desperate. Nowhere is this cultural discrepancy more visible than in the retail stores of China and its neighbors versus U.S. pharmacies. In Eastern cultures, stores display aisles (yes plural) of tonics, extracts, curatives, preventatives and even love potions. In the U.S. most of these products lie behind the pharmacist’s counter. To the Western mind, if something has a therapeutic effect, then it must be demonstrated by scientific method and require a medical prescription for use.
As a scientist, I am not here to justify one approach over the other but to point out an obvious reality. Milk is a product designed by nature to do many of the things all those concoctions in the Eastern aisles and Western pharmacies portend to do. From an Eastern perspective, milk would seem an intuitively obvious choice for all kinds of beneficial features. To the Western mind, milk represents eons of evolutionary pressure to get the system right. If we can understand this system, it then can be exploited for developing products to deliver benefits to consumers whatever their specific need, such as immunology to the elderly, support for development to the infant, ease of digestion to the surgically compromised, and nutritional density to all. And so it plays out that the demand for milk in the East continues to expand exponentially while the search for understanding how nature does all this goes on in the West. The Eastern approach is pragmatic while the Western approach takes much more time and resources. There is merit in both approaches, and they both circle around the concept of nutritional (not caloric) density.
Nutrient density refers to the ratio of a broad level of nutrients over total calories. Consumers in the East look for balancing a diet long on vegetables with the nutrients and growth factors available in milk, while consumers in the West look to dairy products for balancing diets long on refined sugars and hydrogenated fat (read: empty calories) and short on nutrition. In both cases, the basic diet is low in nutritional density, which goes hand in hand with compromised health. Adding milk raises the nutritional density and diversity of nutrients accessible to a population.
Nutrition science has grown far beyond the usual look at amino acids, essential lipids, carbohydrates, minerals and vitamins of yesterday. Using the tools of nutrition science today to look at the milk model, we can see each molecule serving multiple nutritional and health purposes.
For example, a protein can alter its conformation in the stomach acid to protect the stomach as the HAMLET (human alpha-lactalbumin made lethal to tumor cells) project has shown. As this same changed protein moves to the intestine, the digestive enzymes uncover new biological activity. By the time this protein, or what is left of it, finds its way to the colon, it is food for the bacteria residing there. The point is that all along the digestive tract this protein changed its biological activity. This didn’t happen by accident. Nature figured out how to design milk to do this.
Nutrition has gone far beyond the basic nutrient days, and the single-nutrient approach recommended by health professionals makes little sense today. By simply adding calcium to overcome a calcium deficiency without taking into consideration the form of the calcium, the presence of other interacting minerals, the role of other components in the meal and even the role of the intestinal bacteria is short-sighted and gives the consumer unrealistic expectations.
Changing the mindset of researchers who are personally invested in a narrowly focused view of nutrition will be difficult but will happen simply because it makes sense. Any entrepreneurial scientist will eventually recognize the opportunity within the context of interactive bioactivity and adjust his/her research program accordingly.
While consumers have been well-trained to think in blocks of single nutrients, this too will change as we see success in maintaining good health through an interactive bioactive approach to nutrition. For example, in the news we’ve learned that each of us responds to our diet in a unique fashion. Some of us may gain body weight but keep our blood lipid profile in the healthy range while others experience a different reality. The same concept applies to those who are lean – the blood lipid patterns will vary. Some of us get healthier at a lower weight while others respond less dramatically. The National Dairy Council has been funding work like this for many years, mostly at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute in Berkeley, Calif. It all comes down to personal physiology and our diets. It’s not just the list of nutrients we consume but ratios, interactions and the bioactivity of the food that comes into play.
Bioactivity, positive and negative (remember – toxins are biologically active, too) is found in all foods. Milk serves as a guide because nature already did the research. We just have to map it out and apply the same principles to all foods. In the end, the term nutritional density will consider bioactivity of the components as well as a list of basic vitamins, proteins, fats and minerals. Once this is done, foods can be designed to meet the individual nutritional needs of each consumer. The era of customized nutrition is not a pipe dream, thanks to the changing face of nutritional research.
This article first ran in the Aug. 22, 2008, issue of Cheese Market News.
