The Experts below are selected from a list of 9086163 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Anthony Fardet - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Exclusive Reductionism, chronic diseases and nutritional confusion: the degree of processing as a lever for improving public health
Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, 2020Co-Authors: Anthony Fardet, Edmond RockAbstract:Exclusive Reductionism in nutritional science consists of viewing foods as only the sum of nutrients. This position paper argues that the extreme application of this paradigm since 1950 has greatly contributed to confusion about a healthy diet among consumers and to the development of chronic diseases worldwide. First, history of nutritional sciences in Western countries shows that by approximately 1850, laboratory research had mainly been conducted by reducing foods to nutrients that were interchangeable from one food to another. Second, descriptive and experimental studies show that the increased prevalence of chronic diseases mainly derive from ultra-processed foods. With such foods being representative of a final output in the degree of food processing, the relevance of reformulating food versus developing less unstructured processed foods is discussed. Third, the reductionist validation of food additives, randomized controlled trials, and food scoring is also questioned. Additionally, epidemiological studies that associate dietary patterns with the risk of chronic diseases and that aggregate approaches in nutrition, technology, food science and food scoring appear to be more adapted for nutritional recommendations in society. It is concluded that a complementary holistic perspective is needed to communicate to society about diet/food health potential and to efficiently prevent populations from chronic diseases.
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Reductionist versus holistic paradigms in nutrition science
2017Co-Authors: Anthony FardetAbstract:Up today nutrition science, in Western countries, has been mainly experimented according to the reductionist paradigm. Reductionism is based on the assumption that since reality is too complex to be studied as such it needs to be fragmented into isolated entities that are studied according to the view that the whole is equal to the sum of the part (2 = 1+1) on the basis of a linear cause-effect relationship. As a result foods are considered as only sums of nutrients and calories ; and one nutrient is generally associated with one deregulated metabolism then one chronic disease (e.g., relationship between saturated fats, dyslipidemia and atherosclerosis whereas it is a reducing association). Reductionism can be considered as the main deep cause at the roots of diet-related chronic diseases that are encountered in populations consuming the most fractionated/recombined and refined ultra-processed foods, the ultimate consequence of Reductionism. Indeed, if foods are only sums of nutrients why not cracking them in a multitude of nutrients and to recombine them. Nutritional supplements, functional foods and ultra-processed foods are therefore the consequences of our modern reductionist science. They are also based on the assumption that food health potential is based on its composition only. On the contrary, holism views whole foods as more than a sum of nutrients because of synergy of action of nutrients and food matrix effect. Holistic nutrition science defines food health potential as combination of both matrix and compositional effects. Food is more than the only sum of nutrients (2 > 1+1). Matrix effect is crucial because it impacts satiety potential and nutrient bioavailability, both playing a crucial role to maintain a good health. Therefore two foods of identical composition but with a different matrix have not the same health potential. Therefore to fight against the increasing prevalence of diet-related chronic diseases we need today to base more nutrition science on the holistic paradigm. Whereas recombined/refined ultra-processed foods are the fruit of Reductionism whole and complex foods participate more of the holistic paradigm which should encourage technologists to less process foods to preserve their matrix, and public authorities to lay emphasis on minimally-processed foods as a basis of a healthy diet. In addition to food science and technology the holistic paradigm may find other important applications in the study of diets on human health. Randomized controlled studies are coming from reductionist and pharmacologist designs, very far from real life, and cannot yield long-term and effective applicable results. Nutrition science is not pharmacology and foods are not drugs: therefore application of holism should prompt nutritionists to carry out intervention studies in complex real life conditions (taking into account all aspects of dietary lifestyles), and not to control only one
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Complex foods versus functional foods, nutraceuticals and dietary supplements: differential health impact (Part 1)
Agro-food-Industry Hi Tech, 2015Co-Authors: Anthony FardetAbstract:What differentiates natural complex foods from nutraceuticals and dietary supplements is food structure, this latter involving nutrient interaction and synergism, and a complex mixture at nutritional doses. Scientific evidence showed that functional foods, nutraceuticals and dietary supplements (FND) have failed stopping chronic diseases epidemics: most conclusions of recent meta-analyses and systematic reviews are lack of significant health effect and needs for further studies. Why such disappointing results? Probably because FND results from a curative and reductionist nutritional approach while complex foods participates in a preventive and holistic approach. Indeed, Reductionism has led to fractionate foods, isolating compounds from them for use at supra-nutritional doses in FND. Holism considers foods as complex systems in which the whole is more than sum of the parts leading to more sustainable health effects, and technological treatments more respectful of food structure.
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Complex foods versus functional foods, nutraceuticals and dietary supplements: differential health impact (Part 2)
Agro-food-Industry Hi Tech, 2015Co-Authors: Anthony FardetAbstract:What differentiates natural complex foods from nutraceuticals and dietary supplements is food structure, this latter involving nutrient interaction and synergism, and a complex mixture at nutritional doses. Scientific evidence showed that functional foods, nutraceuticals and dietary supplements (FND) have failed stopping chronic diseases epidemics: most conclusions of recent meta-analyses and systematic reviews are lack of significant health effect and needs for further studies. Why such disappointing results? Probably because FND results from a curative and reductionist nutritional approach while complex foods participates in a preventive and holistic approach. Indeed, Reductionism has led to fractionate foods, isolating compounds from them for use at supra-nutritional doses in FND. Holism considers foods as complex systems in which the whole is more than sum of the parts leading to more sustainable health effects, and technological treatments more respectful of food structure.
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Toward a New Philosophy of Preventive Nutrition: From a Reductionist to a Holistic Paradigm to Improve Nutritional Recommendations
Advances in Nutrition, 2014Co-Authors: Anthony Fardet, Edmond RockAbstract:The reductionist approach has been predominant to date in human nutrition research and has unraveled some of the fundamental mechanisms at the basis of food nutrients (e.g., those that involve deficiency diseases). In Western countries, along with progress in medicine and pharmacology, the reductionist approach helped to increase life expectancy. However, despite 40 y of research in nutrition, epidemics of obesity and diabetes are growing each year worldwide, both in developed and developing countries, leading to a decrease in healthy life years. Yet, interactions between nutrition-health relations cannot be modeled on the basis of a linear cause-effect relation between 1 food compound and 1 physiologic effect but rather from multicausal nonlinear relations. In other words, explaining the whole from the specific by a bottom-up reductionist approach has its limits. A top-down approach becomes necessary to investigate complex issues through a holistic view before addressing any specific question to explain the whole. However, it appears that both approaches are necessary and mutually reinforcing. In this review, Eastern and Western research perspectives are first presented, laying out bases for what could be the consequences of applying a reductionist versus holistic approach to research in nutrition vis-a-vis public health, environmental sustainability, breeding, biodiversity, food science and processing, and physiology for improving nutritional recommendations. Therefore, research that replaces Reductionism with a more holistic approach will reveal global and efficient solutions to the problems encountered from the field to the plate. Preventive human nutrition can no longer be considered as "pharmacology" or foods as "drugs.
Edmond Rock - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Exclusive Reductionism, chronic diseases and nutritional confusion: the degree of processing as a lever for improving public health
Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, 2020Co-Authors: Anthony Fardet, Edmond RockAbstract:Exclusive Reductionism in nutritional science consists of viewing foods as only the sum of nutrients. This position paper argues that the extreme application of this paradigm since 1950 has greatly contributed to confusion about a healthy diet among consumers and to the development of chronic diseases worldwide. First, history of nutritional sciences in Western countries shows that by approximately 1850, laboratory research had mainly been conducted by reducing foods to nutrients that were interchangeable from one food to another. Second, descriptive and experimental studies show that the increased prevalence of chronic diseases mainly derive from ultra-processed foods. With such foods being representative of a final output in the degree of food processing, the relevance of reformulating food versus developing less unstructured processed foods is discussed. Third, the reductionist validation of food additives, randomized controlled trials, and food scoring is also questioned. Additionally, epidemiological studies that associate dietary patterns with the risk of chronic diseases and that aggregate approaches in nutrition, technology, food science and food scoring appear to be more adapted for nutritional recommendations in society. It is concluded that a complementary holistic perspective is needed to communicate to society about diet/food health potential and to efficiently prevent populations from chronic diseases.
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Toward a New Philosophy of Preventive Nutrition: From a Reductionist to a Holistic Paradigm to Improve Nutritional Recommendations
Advances in Nutrition, 2014Co-Authors: Anthony Fardet, Edmond RockAbstract:The reductionist approach has been predominant to date in human nutrition research and has unraveled some of the fundamental mechanisms at the basis of food nutrients (e.g., those that involve deficiency diseases). In Western countries, along with progress in medicine and pharmacology, the reductionist approach helped to increase life expectancy. However, despite 40 y of research in nutrition, epidemics of obesity and diabetes are growing each year worldwide, both in developed and developing countries, leading to a decrease in healthy life years. Yet, interactions between nutrition-health relations cannot be modeled on the basis of a linear cause-effect relation between 1 food compound and 1 physiologic effect but rather from multicausal nonlinear relations. In other words, explaining the whole from the specific by a bottom-up reductionist approach has its limits. A top-down approach becomes necessary to investigate complex issues through a holistic view before addressing any specific question to explain the whole. However, it appears that both approaches are necessary and mutually reinforcing. In this review, Eastern and Western research perspectives are first presented, laying out bases for what could be the consequences of applying a reductionist versus holistic approach to research in nutrition vis-a-vis public health, environmental sustainability, breeding, biodiversity, food science and processing, and physiology for improving nutritional recommendations. Therefore, research that replaces Reductionism with a more holistic approach will reveal global and efficient solutions to the problems encountered from the field to the plate. Preventive human nutrition can no longer be considered as "pharmacology" or foods as "drugs.
David Peterson - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Ontology and politics: The problems of emergence and Reductionism in integrative health science
Social Theory & Health, 2014Co-Authors: David PetersonAbstract:The call for more integration between the social and physical sciences has been intensifying in recent years. This project has been especially active in the sociology of health where a number of integrative models have been proposed. However, these models have theoretical problems that have limited their empirical usefulness. Specifically, they have not adequately addressed the theoretical issues surrounding the emergence and reductionsim that occur in multilevel models of health and illness. Using examples from recent research in health and illness, this essay proposes a new conceptualization of integrative science that is based on a pragmatic tension between emergence and Reductionism. This will reorient the focus from questions of ontology to questions of pragmatics. In doing so, I seek to craft a theory that can make sense of multilevel research while being sensitive to the inevitable problems of complexity and structural violence that develop in the translation of multilevel health research into diverse social realities.
Garland E. Allen - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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A Pact with the Embryo: Viktor Hamburger, Holistic and Mechanistic Philosophy in the Development of Neuroembryology, 1927–1955
Journal of the History of Biology, 2004Co-Authors: Garland E. AllenAbstract:Viktor Hamburger was a developmental biologist interested in the ontogenesis of the vertebrate nervous system. A student of Hans Spemann at Freiburg in the 1920s, Hamburger picked up a holistic view of the embryo that precluded him from treating it in a reductionist way; at the same time, he was committed to a materialist and analytical approach that eschewed any form of vitalism or metaphysics. This paper explores how Hamburger walked this thin line between mechanistic Reductionism and metaphysical vitalism in light of his work on the factors influencing growth of neurons into limb buds, and the discovery of nerve growth factor, work carried out with Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen.
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A Pact with the Embryo: Viktor Hamburger,
2004Co-Authors: Garland E. AllenAbstract:Viktor Hamburger was a developmental biologist interested in the ontogen- esis of the vertebrate nervous system. A student of Hans Spemann at Freiburg in the 1920s, Hamburger picked up a holistic view of the embryo that precluded him from treating it in a reductionist way; at the same time, he was committed to a materialist and analytical approach that eschewed any form of vitalism or metaphysics. This paper explores how Hamburger walked this thin line between mechanistic Reductionism and metaphysical vitalism in light of his work on the factors influencing growth of neurons into limb buds, and the discovery of nerve growth factor, work carried out with Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen.
Fulvio Mazzocchi - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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complexity and the Reductionism holism debate in systems biology
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Systems Biology and Medicine, 2012Co-Authors: Fulvio MazzocchiAbstract:Reductionism has largely influenced the development of science, culminating in its application to molecular biology. An increasing number of novel research findings have, however, shattered this view, showing how the molecular-reductionist approach cannot entirely handle the complexity of biological systems. Within this framework, the advent of systems biology as a new and more integrative field of research is described, along with the form which has taken on the debate of Reductionism versus holism. Such an issue occupies a central position in systems biology, and nonetheless it is not always clearly delineated. This partly occurs because different dimensions (ontological, epistemological, methodological) are involved, and yet the concerned ones often remain unspecified. Besides, within systems biology different streams can be distinguished depending on the degree of commitment to embrace genuine systemic principles. Some useful insights into the future development of this discipline might be gained from the tradition of complexity and self-organization. This is especially true with regards the idea of self-reference, which incorporated into the organizational scheme is able to generate autonomy as an emergent property of the biological whole.
