American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol 67, 583S-590S, Copyright © 1998 by The American Society for Clinical Nutrition, Inc

REVIEW ARTICLES

Practical and realistic approaches to healthier diet modifications

AS Truswell
Department of Biochemistry, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Nutrition research cannot improve people's health until the results influence their purchases and consumption of food and drink. There is much noise in the food information system. The most efficient solution to the problem of insufficient or conflicting public information is for all the data to be critically evaluated by a well-balanced expert committee convened by an authoritative body to produce dietary guidelines for wide publication. Such guidelines in different countries have many similar elements. Guidelines cannot be revised every year, but should be adapted only in response to major new research findings rather than to reports about nutrition in the media, which are no more than trivial distractions. The problems of family physicians giving one- on-one nutritional advice are discussed. For public health nutrition work, dietary guidelines have a range of products such as food guides and health claims on foods that are the tools of nutrition education. In developed countries, consumption of some foods has changed along with the guidelines; consumption of other foods has not. Coronary artery disease mortality has declined but obesity has increased. A more food-based approach to nutrition education is to use ideal diets as the model, such as the traditional Mediterranean diet, Japanese diet, or "hunter-gatherer" diets. These ideal diets would then need to be adapted to our present food preparation technology.

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