Genes Related to Fat Metabolism in Pigs and Intramuscular Fat Content of Pork: A Focus on Nutrigenetics and Nutrigenomics

Fat metabolism and intramuscular fat (IMF) are qualitative traits in pigs whose development are influenced by several genes and metabolic pathways. Nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics offer prospects in estimating nutrients required by a pig. Application of these emerging fields in nutritional science provides an opportunity for matching nutrients based on the genetic make-up of the pig for trait improvements. Today, integration of high throughput “omics” technologies into nutritional genomic research has revealed many quantitative trait loci (QTLs) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for the mutation(s) of key genes directly or indirectly involved in fat metabolism and IMF deposition in pigs. Nutrient–gene interaction and the underlying molecular mechanisms involved in fatty acid synthesis and marbling in pigs is difficult to unravel. While existing knowledge on QTLs and SNPs of genes related to fat metabolism and IMF development is yet to be harmonized, the scientific explanations behind the nature of the existing correlation between the nutrients, the genes and the environment remain unclear, being inconclusive or lacking precision. This paper aimed to: (1) discuss nutrigenetics, nutrigenomics and epigenetic mechanisms controlling fat metabolism and IMF accretion in pigs; (2) highlight the potentials of these concepts in pig nutritional programming and research.

Functional Foods for Treatment and Prevention of Obesity and Its Associated Disorders

Obesity has now become an epidemic affecting wide variety of population across the world. It is associated with a cluster of cardiovascular diseases and other related metabolic disorders such as diabetes, hypertension, and cancer which is mainly caused due to the dysbiosis in the energy intake and expenditure. Researchers have found a wide variety of functional foods from different sources which help in combating and prevention of obesity and its related diseases. Recent advancement in nutritional science has led to the development of several functional foods with low glycemic index. The present chapter highlights about the problems related to obesity and the importance of various functional foods which have great potential to be incorporated in our daily diet to curb the menace of obesity.

TRENDS OF DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATIONS FOR DESIGNING FOODSTUFFS

Рассмотрены основные требования к науке о питании и новые подходы к усовершенствованию состава, свойств и технологий пищевых продуктов, обусловленные изменением пищевого статуса человека, к которому предъявляются более высокие критерии, учитывающие изменения экологии, условий и интенсивности труда, влияние стрессов на психоэмоциональное состояние человека. Установлено, что основные направления совершенствования биопотенциала и гигиенического статуса пищевых продуктов на этапе проектирования рецептурных решений базируются на привлечении новых нутрицевтиков, парафармацевтиков, эубиотиков из сырья природного происхождения или продуктов его глубокой переработки. Перспективным направлением в совершенствовании технологий и расширении ассортимента продуктов функционального назначения, направленного диетического, лечебного и профилактического действия, необходимых для организации биокорректирующего питания и ликвидации алиментарно-дефицитных состояний различных групп населения, является применение нейросетевых методов математического моделирования, которые позволят с высокой точностью получать значения выходных показателей качества пищевых систем в зависимости от варьирования исходных характеристик и параметров технологических процессов. The basic requirements for nutritional science and new approaches to improve the composition, properties and technologies of food products due to changes in the nutritional status of the person to which higher demands are placed, taking into account environmental changes, conditions and intensity of labour, the impact of stress on mental and emotional state, are considered. It is established that the main directions of improvement of the biopotential and the hygienic status of food products at the design stage prescription decisions are based on the attraction of new nutraceuticals and parapharmaceutics, eubiotikov from raw materials of natural origin or products of its deep processing. A promising direction in improving the technology and expanding the range of functional foods aimed diet, therapeutic and preventive actions needed for the organization of bio correction power and to eliminate the nutritional-deficient states of various groups population groups, is the application of neural network mathematical modeling methods, which allow with high accuracy to obtain values of output indicators of the quality of food systems, depending on the variation of initial characteristics and parameters of technological processes.

Applications of Metabolomics to Precision Nutrition

<b><i>Background:</i></b> For thousands of years, disabilities due to nutrient deficiencies have plagued humanity. Rickets, scurvy, anemia, stunted growth, blindness, and mental handicaps due to nutrient deficiencies affected up to 1/10 of the world’s population prior to 1900. The discovery of essential amino acids, vitamins, and minerals, in the early 1900s, led to a fundamental change in our understanding of food and a revolution in human health. Widespread vitamin and mineral supplementation, the development of recommended dietary allowances, and the implementation of food labeling and testing along with significant improvements in food production and food quality have meant that nutrient-related disorders have almost vanished in the developed world. The success of nutritional science in preventing disease at a population-wide level is one of the great scientific triumphs of the 20th century. The challenge for nutritional science in the 21st century is to understand how to use nutrients and other food constituents to enhance human health or prevent disease at a more personal level. This is the primary goal of precision nutrition. <b><i>Summary:</i></b> Precision nutrition is an emerging branch of nutrition science that aims to use modern omics technologies (genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) to assess an individual’s response to specific foods or dietary patterns and thereby determine the most effective diet or lifestyle interventions to prevent or treat specific diseases in that individual. Metabolomics is vital to nearly every aspect of precision nutrition. It can be used to comprehensively characterize the thousands of chemicals in foods, to identify food byproducts in human biofluids or tissues, to characterize nutrient deficiencies or excesses, to monitor biochemical responses to dietary interventions, to track long-term or short-term dietary habits, and to guide the development of nutritional therapies. In this review, we will describe how metabolomics has been used to advance the field of precision nutrition by providing some notable examples or use cases. First, we will describe how metabolomics helped launch the field of precision nutrition through the diagnosis and dietary therapy of individuals with inborn errors of metabolism. Next, we will describe how metabolomics is being used to comprehensively characterize the full chemical complexity of many key foods, and how this is revealing much more about nutrients than ever imagined. Third, we will describe how metabolomics is being used to identify food consumption biomarkers and how this opens the door to a more objective and quantitative assessments of an individual’s diet and their response to certain foods. Finally, we will describe how metabolomics is being coupled with other omics technologies to develop custom diets and lifestyle interventions that are leading to positive health benefits. <b><i>Key Message:</i></b> Metabolomics is vital to the advancement of nutritional science and in making the dream of precision nutrition a reality.

Predicting anticancer hyperfoods with graph convolutional networks

Background Recent efforts in the field of nutritional science have allowed the discovery of disease-beating molecules within foods based on the commonality of bioactive food molecules to FDA-approved drugs. The pioneering work in this field used an unsupervised network propagation algorithm to learn the systemic-wide effect on the human interactome of 1962 FDA-approved drugs and a supervised algorithm to predict anticancer therapeutics using the learned representations. Then, a set of bioactive molecules within foods was fed into the model, which predicted molecules with cancer-beating potential.The employed methodology consisted of disjoint unsupervised feature generation and classification tasks, which can result in sub-optimal learned drug representations with respect to the classification task. Additionally, due to the disjoint nature of the tasks, the employed approach proved cumbersome to optimize, requiring testing of thousands of hyperparameter combinations and significant computational resources.To overcome the technical limitations highlighted above, we represent each drug as a graph (human interactome) with its targets as binary node features on the graph and formulate the problem as a graph classification task. To solve this task, inspired by the success of graph neural networks in graph classification problems, we use an end-to-end graph neural network model operating directly on the graphs, which learns drug representations to optimize model performance in the prediction of anticancer therapeutics. Results The proposed model outperforms the baseline approach in the anticancer therapeutic prediction task, achieving an F1 score of 67.99%±2.52% and an AUPR of 73.91%±3.49%. It is also shown that the model is able to capture knowledge of biological pathways to predict anticancer molecules based on the molecules’ effects on cancer-related pathways. Conclusions We introduce an end-to-end graph convolutional model to predict cancer-beating molecules within food. The introduced model outperforms the existing baseline approach, and shows interpretability, paving the way to the future of a personalized nutritional science approach allowing the development of nutrition strategies for cancer prevention and/or therapeutics.

Hungry, hungry hikers: Fitness, cooking, and gender in American hiking, 1890s–1920s

This article examines the recollections of American mountaineers and hikers written between the 1890s and 1920s to interrogate the evolving relationship hikers had with food consumption and physical fitness on the trail. It centres firstly on the trail accounts of Appalachian Mountain Club (1876) and Sierra Club (1892) members, before moving towards articles that appeared in outdoor recreation magazines such as Outing. Contrasting itself with existing scholarly work that has focused on the ecological impact of industrial food systems within environmental history, this article seeks to explore the unexamined social and cultural power of food on early American outdoorsmen and women. By highlighting the high-altitude discourses surrounding food and physical ability on the mountainside, the article demonstrates how potentially productive debates about food and modernity are complicated by contemporary ideas of gender and propriety. It also further demonstrates how early suspicions about nutritional science and the privileged, often-chauvinistic culture of American mountaineering limited the ability of these wealthy fitness communities to communicate a wider message about the nation’s shifting health fortunes.

Nutrition content of summative examinations within an Australian 4-year graduate entry medical course: 2013–2016

BackgroundPoor nutrition is a major contributor to chronic disease, but the level of nutrition education in medical training is limited. Deakin University Medical School has been working to embed more nutrition into the curriculum since 2009.AimTo assess the nutrition content of all summative examinations in the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery over a 4-year period.MethodsThe type, amount and scope of nutrition-related questions were assessed in all summative examinations delivered to all 4-year levels from 2013 to 2016. These were assessed independently and analysed for nutrition content. The amount of nutrition was quantified, and the nutrition topic areas and nutrition competencies addressed were documented.ResultsLess than 10% of summative examination questions contained any nutrition content. For first-year and second-year students, these examinations included an average yearly total of 433 multiple choice questions (MCQs) (range 337–530) and 47 short answer questions (SAQs) (range 33–62). Third-year and fourth-year students had 150 MCQs on average per year and no SAQs. The percentage of nutrition-related questions across all 4 years ranged from 6% in 2013 to 10% in 2016. The proportion of SAQs with nutrition content ranged from 12% in 2013 to 19% in 2016. Basic nutritional sciences, accounted for 60% of nutrition content and, 25% addressed dietary strategies for prevention and treatment of disease, and skills-based nutrition competencies represented approximately 10% of all questions.Summary and conclusionsMinimal nutrition was included in the summative examinations. There did not appear to be any consistent increase in the nutrition content of MCQs over the 4-year period but there was some indication of an increase in nutrition content in SAQs. Longer term evaluation is required to confirm this trend. Only a small number of nutrition questions were skills based, most focused on basic nutritional science. Examinations included few skills-based nutrition questions, and consideration of setting a minimum level of nutrition in examinations could assist in ensuring the development of appropriate nutrition competencies in medical graduates.