Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled Human Nutrition, Environment and Health, organized by Martin Kussmann, Hannelore Daniel and Jacqueline Pontes Monteiro. The meeting will be held in Beijing, China from October 14-19, 2015. Diet is a crucial environmental factor in helping individuals live healthy, productive and disease free lives. The increasing incidence of complex, age-related chronic diseases, as well as the ongoing prevalence of malnutrition, is fueling scientific, ethical and economic calls for intensifying and improving translational health care research. Understanding the interaction of nutrition and lifestyle with an individual's genetic makeup is a crucial step in developing strategies that prevent or delay metabolic and cognitive decline. This pro-active approach helps sustain well-being and complements the reactive approach of using pharmaceuticals to treat symptoms. Translational research requires an interdisciplinary systems approach that embraces the complexity of human individuality in a rapidly changing environment. Nutrigenomics is a translational field that investigates how genomic and epigenomic individuality influences dietary response, health and disease. It also looks at how an individual's genome expresses itself at the different omic levels (proteomics, metabonomics, lipidomics) in response to the environment stresses, especially nutrition. Molecular phenotyping of humans over time and across healthy, safe exposures represents new research that begins to embrace nutritional, environmental, genomic, microbiological and epidemiological competencies, thereby challenging classical nutritional approaches. Moreover, nutrition is advancing from a reductionist and descriptive approach to a more quantitative, systems-level science. The goals and outcomes of this meeting include bringing together researchers from traditionally separated disciplines such as nutrition, genomics, physiology, epidemiology, analytics and bio-mathematics. We hope to advance nutrition research as a quantitative, holistic and molecular science. A re-examining classical pre- clinical models and clinical study designs will allow the incorporation of improved translational in vitro and in vivo models, human intervention study designs, and innovative new tools/technologies for molecular phenotyping and capture of human diet and lifestyle.
The final aim of this project is to connect basic laboratory science to consumer-relevant outputs such as personalized dietary/nutritional counseling and monitoring/diagnostics.
Diet is a crucial environmental factor in helping individuals live healthy, productive and disease free lives. Both the ongoing prevalence of malnutrition and the increasing incidence of nutrition and lifestyle-related chronic diseases require a comprehensive characterization of the complex interactions between the environment an individual's genetic make-up. The Keystone Symposia meeting on Human Nutrition, Environment and Health will bring together interdisciplinary researchers from nutrition, genomics, physiology, epidemiology, analytics, biomathematics to critically examine issues at the intersection of human diet and lifestyle.
