ILSI Europe’s International Symposium Speakers Outline the Need for a Tailored Approach

With life expectancy continually on the rise, people want to stay healthy and active for longer. Achieving this will not only result in a better quality of life for the ageing, but will have a significant and positive impact on healthcare costs. What can diet do to help our bodies cope with ageing? Is nutrigenetics the way forward? And who is going to pay for our healthier ageing generations?

Oct 11 2011 --- With life expectancy continually on the rise, people want to stay healthy and active for longer. Achieving this will not only result in a better quality of life for the ageing, but will have a significant and positive impact on healthcare costs. What can diet do to help our bodies cope with ageing? Is nutrigenetics the way forward? And who is going to pay for our healthier ageing generations? These issues and more were discussed during the penultimate session of ILSI Europe’s International Symposium on the Health Benefits of Foods dedicated to examining targeted nutrition, and testing its benefits.

To open the second last session of ILSI Europe’s Symposium, Professor Claudio Franceschi from the University of Bologna, Italy, presented the challenge of healthy ageing as the capacity to cope with chronic inflammation referring to it as “inflamm-aging.” On this basis, he believes that dietary intervention is one of the most promising strategies to slow down age-associated disorders. He described a European-wide project, known as “NU-AGE”, involving 1,250 elderly volunteers from the UK, the Netherlands, Poland, France and Italy, that will assess the impact of an improved Mediterranean diet over a one-year period. This study will include an evaluation of the potential role of the gut microbiota. Professor Franceschi also reported on the genetic specificities of centenarians with some specific epigenetic changes, and also identified a threshold for gut microbiota, stating that they can be termed ‘old’ after 75 years of age.

Professor Anne Marie Minihane, from the University of East Anglia, UK, explained that the variability of the genetic backgrounds of consumers can’t fit with generic dietary recommendation: There is no ‘one size fits all approach’ to diet. Working on specific genetic subgroups, she also discovered that even the same specific genetic capital is not equally expressed according to sex, or ethnicity. In scientific words: “The penetrance of genotypes is not homogenous”. She concluded by stating that nutrigenetics is a young science but should be taken into account for future recommendations.

This idea of personalised nutrition and nutrigenetics was challenged by Professor Hannelore Daniel of the Technical University of Munich. She proposed that health is mainly a transitory trend, and that the real success of dietary guidelines is to fulfil nutritional needs. The major dietetic challenge will be to feed the expected 8 billions of consumers in 20 years time. The societal challenge from her point of view will be that in the near future each young worker will have to pay for one old retired citizen. The scientific and societal challenge will be to generate a vision strong enough to convince politicians to invest more on nutrition and less, for example, on impressive physics instruments like the CERN where 5.100 million euros have been invested to find a single particle. Despite this, Professor Daniel concluded by recognising the contribution of technology in developing the tools needed to implement personalised nutrition and that the drug industry is starting to use a similar strategy. The final societal challenge will be: who will pay for this, and will this approach increase or decrease social inequalities.