Download Food and Nutrition Research (Report of the ARC/MRC Committee)

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BIOCHEMICAL SOCIETY TRANSACTIONS
Food and Nutrition Research (Report of the ARC/M[RC Committee)
H.M.S.O., London, 1974, pp. 211, f3.80
If you want to know what view the conventional biochemist takes of nutrition
research, this Report will enlighten you better than anything else that has been written
recently. It gives you a great deal of information, though not always complete or
unchallengeable, on such matters as the metabolic role of the vitamins and mineral
elements, the complexities of energy production and energy homoeostasis, and
especially-and at length-the biochemistry and metabolism of protein and amino acids.
The biochemist will feel entirely at home when coming across cystathioninase,
squalene oxidocyclase and phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase, and pancreozymin,
enteroglucagon and aldosterone.
The Report deals with other matters, too; there are brief sections, for example, on food
additives, microbial and chemical contaminants, and new protein foods, and also on
nutritional aspects of vascular disease, diabetes mellitus and cancer.
Those of us, however, who believe that nutrition is concerned with man and his food
will be disappointed that the social aspects of nutrition are touched on only casually.
Just one page isdevoted to‘Ways of influencingfood consumption patterns’; undoubtedly
this is a subject that has not been adequately studied, but there is nevertheless a
considerable literature that seems to have been overlooked by the Committee. The only
suggestion for further research into this question, recognized by F A 0 as of the greatest
importance in dealing with problems of malnutrition in the Third World, is to study
the effects of advertising campaigns on the nutritional value of the diet of different
sections of the public.
And, in the Western World, the major problem in ensuring good nutrition is also one
of ‘influencingfood consumption patterns’, for large numbers of people choose to eat the
wrong foods when they can-most of them-afford to eat the right foods. Malnutrition
is not a matter only of dietary inadequacy, although this is the only usage of the word that
the Report recognizes; malnutrition means wrong nutrition, and it refers equally to
dietary excess, both general and specific: too much food or too much of the wrong food.
It is incongruous for the Report to speak of ‘the general good state of nutrition in the UK’
and then-quite correctly-to discuss the increasing prevalence of diabetes, the increasing and considerable prevalence of ischaemic heart disease, and the even greater
prevalence of obesity; it mentions the ubiquitous disease of malnutrition, dental caries,
but it does so only indirectly in relation to fluoride.
This Report will help to entrench the belief-the increasingly erroneous belief-that
Nutrition is for the most part a subspeciality of biochemistry, and that consequently
nutrition research should chiefly be directed to unravelling the biochemistry of the
nutrients, the way they perform in the body, and the biochemical transformations in
which they are involved. This is an excellent way of ensuring that human nutrition
continues to be the neglected science that the Report deplores, and of continuing the
‘failure to indicate to the younger generation of scientists that nutrition deals with
problems which are intellectually challenging and that the solution of these is likely
to benefit the community directly’. The Report suggests that the part-the biochemical
part-is virtually equal to the whole-the nutritional whole. Such an approach may
appeal to the young scientist seeking only a narrow intellectual stimulation in his chosen
career. But many young people who look for a career that has social relevance will not
see how they will be able ‘to benefit the community directly’ by devoting their working
lives to a subject that is described, in the opening sentence of the Report, in this way:
‘The science of human nutrition is mainly concerned with defining the optimum amounts
of the constituents of food necessary to achieve or maintain health’.
J. YUDKlN
1975