Importance of Nutrition

Joulukuussa 2009 kirjoittamani teksti:

Jyrki Turunen
jytturun@hytti.uku.fi
Biosciences study program
Nutrition in Life Cycle
NLC 2009


Importance of nutrition in maintaining good health
For health persons nutrition is one of those subjects which can affect to your health positively. In addition to energy need, however, we also need other nutrients like vitamins and minerals. To maintain our good health we have to consider our balanced diet. Let start by asking, how we can affect our nutritive balance by handling our daily food choices. Nutrition is not just the worthless question, but something we have to think about by dealing our nutritive status. We just are not similar by our digestion, but we constantly need same basic nutrients to maintain our good health. By having insufficient amount of nutrients there can be some deficiencies. So we cannot address the importance of nutrition too much to prevent malnutrition and many diseases caused by loss of vitamins and minerals. Proteins, carbohydrates and fat are the main components of food we need to keep our body mass index relatively good level. Of course, we can’t get our weight to gain up because of risk to get many diseases which might be related to obesity. In terms of good health we have to have good nutrition to keep our social, mental and physical health in proper condition. So we can address next question do we have any condition without nutrition. That question seems to be so obvious that I have to remind myself to get that point out. We are told to believe that by having good breakfast and lunch at school our nutritive needs are balanced. In most cases that are going to be true and same formula can be addressed to other life situations too. How to recognize risk groups and other vulnerable subjects to nutritional deficiencies? There might be a challenge to achieve these people to have best or reasonable nutrition to maintain their health to be good as it should be in terms of good nutrition. If we are able to maintain our decisions and acts at acceptable level we can say that social and mental nutrition are in good shape. At the same time we have to remind that it is not just our spiritual works but physical condition too. As long as we can handle our decisions at acceptable level we may not be able to see if there are some deficiencies in our nutritive status. By following our physical condition we also have some picture about our nutrition. So we can say that nutrition is one of the most interesting topics we have to explain our health.
Risk groups/vulnerable subjects to nutritional deficiencies
Certainly we have some risk groups and vulnerable subjects to nutritional deficiencies. Who they might be? Alcohol consumption might give something that explains lousy nutrition. Other reasons we might address are diseases, lowered absorption of nutrients and eating disorders. We also have to recognize if our needs for balanced diet and good nutrition will change in a context to maintain good health. In this course it is important to recognize your age too, because your metabolism might change, your lifestyle changes or you might change your diet because of demographic reasons. You will get married or start to meet someone and life is not the same anymore even your eating habits might change. We have to understand our metabolic rates to define our nutritive needs in every context of life. We have two sexes and many different ages and life situations to think about. So the complexity of nutrition is obvious and I have write groups and subjects rather than individuals. In every age group there are many risk groups and subjects. An important and interesting question is how to close these people outside of that risk of nutritional deficiencies. We just have very few routes to handle our energy metabolism. I think just four: Krebs’s cycle, glycolysis, beta oxidation and electron transfer system. Four routes include catabolic acts and on the other hand we have also anabolic routes. When this system has balance everything seems to be just fine. We just have to keep in our minds to get relevant amounts of nutritive food and water to handle our functions.
Nutrition in different ages:
Nutrition starts at beginning of our lives and seemingly to have a great importance to our health somewhere in the future. Obesity of children has got bigger problem during last few decades. Usually cancer starts from epithelium where cells have contact to outside molecules. If starts somewhere else some macrophages and inflammation may have reason to that. We have to stress the role of nutrition and our health. In Finland for example STRIP project has some results and nutrition data. Nutrition is very complex issue and many facts have to consider while planning persons health in terms of nutrients in his or her diet. What makes that complexity is our biology and following health status. How to avoid any nutritive diseases or deficiencies? We have to give answer based to our genetic background, but at the same time try to live interesting life.
There is still a tendency to view nutritional aspects of health solely in terms of the presence or absence of nutritional diseases. This view of stems from the rapid advances in knowledge on the role of vitamins in metabolism which developed before and after the Second World War (Turner 1981)
Pregnancy
Pregnancy and pre-pregnancy both are important time for mothers and infants health. We have to take into consideration that some changes happen during the months of pregnancy before it turns to lactation. Once pregnancy has been achieved and in the absence of any medical interference the maternal death rate is approximately 1 in 200 pregnancies and 1 in 20 babies will die before birth, or in the first week of life (Geissler and Powers 2005).
Nutritional status is the state of person’s health in terms of the nutrients in his or her diet.
Recognize crude measures to assess nutritional status
We have seven nutritive important groups which are lipids, carbohydrates, proteins, minerals, vitamins, dietary fiber and water. Despite of age we usually need same compounds to satisfy our nutritive needs. We can measure our nutritive needs by calculating amounts of energy and other mentioned nutrients to assure our growth.
How metabolic changes affect nutrient needs
If any nutrients or energy intake need special attention
Lactation
There is almost universal consensus that breast milk is the best food for normal infants with healthy mothers.
Infancy
Infants are born with essentially untried and immature immune systems. Gastrointestinal resistance to invasion by foreign proteins relies in part on the mucus secretions which contain protective substances such as secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA) and IgM (Poskitt and Morgan 2005). Of course we can think about that if we have totally wrong nutrition there might be some allergies and nutritive defects. Our ability to analyze individual human cancers at the genetic and biochemical levels will also undergo a dramatic change. One day, we imagine that cancer biology and treatment-at present, a patchwork quilt of cell biology, genetics, histopathology, biochemistry, immunology, and pharmacology-will become a science with a conceptual structure and logical coherence that rivals that of chemistry or physics (Hanahan and Weinberg 2000). Originally Hanahan and Weinberg introduced six hallmarks of cancer other six hallmarks of cancer has been proposed by Kroemer and Pouyssegur. Which are DNA damage stress, oxidative stress, mitotic stress, proteotoxic stress, metabolic stress and evading immune surveillance. Elevated levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) result in increased levels of DNA damage that normally elicits senescence or apoptosis but is overcome by tumor cells.
Childhood
Nutrition in childhood must be considered in conjunction with children’s age, growth and development (Poskitt and Morgan 2005). Food allergy and intolerance and the maturation of the immune system in relation to dietary components have to be considered. However, it is evident that the development of obesity, in the vast majority of cases, is a multifactorial event with a genetic predisposition affected by environmental factors which, so far, are not fully understood (Wabitsch 2002). Currently we understand only a minor part of the complex regulatory system of energy homeostasis in man.
Adolescence
Adulthood
Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) is a cytokine involved in systemic inflammation, and to inhibit and is a member of a group of cytokines that stimulate the acute phase reaction, class of proteins whose concentration in blood will increase or decrease in response to inflammation. Inflammation is biological response to harmful stimuli such as pathogens, damaged cells or irritants. Salopuro addresses that “Obesity and insulin resistance are central components of metabolic syndrome (MetS), which is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and cardiovascular diseases. In conclusion, genetic variation in B2AR, B3AR, and LEPR may indicate risk of T2DM, whereas genetic variation in UCP1 and LEPR may modify the risk of obesity. Variation in UCP2-UCP3 (uncoupling protein) gene region is associated with lipid levels and abdominal obesity, which are feature of MetS. Moderate weight reduction involves alterations in the extracellular matrix of adipose tissue, as well as in death of adipocytes (Salopuro 2009). Background of this study was 507 overweight individuals (age: 55±7 years) for whom DNA was available were randomized to both an intensified diet and physical activity group or to a conventional care control group. The most interesting case seems to be that the decrease in mRNA expression on TNF receptor superfamily observed in the present study might indicate the post inflammation state in weight maintenance (Kolehmainen M et al. 2008). Various lipids are involved cell signaling and the conversion of extracellular signals into intracellular ones (Yaqoob, Minihane and Williams 2005).

Older Age
In older age it seems to be important to have good nutrition. Most of things that will affect to our past lives are already taken place somewhere in the past decades. But, still important to have good and proper nutrition, we have to realize the change of our gut flora, bifidobacterium changes to be more likely coliforms. Nutritional Status Assessment (Nutrition) is the most comprehensive inflight study done by NASA to date of human physiologic changes during long-duration space flight; this includes measures of bone metabolism, oxidative damage, nutritional assessments and hormonal changes (NASA).
Public health policies to enhance good nutrition
This experiment will also to help to understand the impact of countermeasures (exercise and pharmaceuticals) on nutritional status and nutrients requirements for astronauts.
References:
Martin Wabitsch. In:Walter Burniat, Tim Cole, Inge Lissau and Elizabeth Poskitt. Editors. Child and Adolescent Obesity. Causes and Consequences, Prevention and Management. p. 50 . 2002. Cambridge University Press.
Salopuro, Titta. 2009. Studies on selected human obesity candidate genes: Genetic variation and adipose tissue expression. Kuopio University Publications D. Medical Sciences 453. 2009. 122 p.
Kolehmainen M et. al. 2008. International Journal of Obesity. 32, 292-303. Weight reduction modulates expression of genes involved in extracellulat matrix and cell death: the GENOBIN study. Nature Publishing Group.
Elizabeth M. E. Poskitt and Jane B. Morgan. Catherine Geissler and Hilary Powers. Editors. Human Nutrition. Eleventh Edition. 2005. Elsevier, Churchill Livingstone.
Parveen Yaqoob, Anne Marie Minihane and Christine Williams. In:Catherine Geissler and Hilary Powers. Editors. Human Nutrition. Eleventh Edition. 2005. Elsevier, Churchill Livingstone.
Douglas Hanahan and Robert A. Weinberg. 2000. The Hallmarks of Cancer. Cell, Vol 100, 57-70, January 7. Cell Press.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/science/experiments/Nutrition.html 14.12.2009
W. P. T. James, J. Powles and D. R. R. Williams. In: Michael R. Turner. Editor. Preventive Nutrition and Society. 1981. Academic Press. London.