What have we learned from the world’s largest nutrition study?

 The NutriNet-Santé study is an ongoing investigation into the relationship between nutrition and health. In this Special Feature, we look at some of the project’s findings and speak with Principal Investigator Dr. Mathilde Touvier, who has been involved in the study since its inception.

A range of factors influences health, including genetics, lifestyle, environmental factors, and diet. Unraveling the complex relationships between these factors is a challenge.

For many reasons, it is incredibly difficult to investigate the role of nutrition in health and disease. For instance, no two people eat the exact same diet, and very few people eat the exact same food 2 days in a row.

As it is neither feasible nor ethical to ask thousands of people to follow a strict diet for 10 years to see what happens, researchers have to find other ways of unpicking the links between diet and disease.

The best way to tackle any difficult health-related question is to generate as much good quality data as possible, and this is the NutriNet-Santé study’s raison d’etre.

Beginning in 2009, the NutriNet-Santé study was the first internet-based study of its kind. By the start of 2021, the team was regularly collecting data from 171,000 people aged 15 years and older, making it the largest ongoing nutrition study in the world.

Now running in France and Belgium, the team is also seeding similar projects in Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

Specifically, the researchers set out with the following aims:

1.   Investigate the relationship between nutrition, health, lifestyle factors, and mortality.

2.   Examine the factors that influence dietary patterns, such as economic and cultural factors.

The researchers keep a biobank of serum, plasma, and urine from about 20,000 people. They also collect stool to monitor and analyze gut bacteria.

Alongside questions about food intake, the NutriNet-Santé team collects information about food packaging, cooking practices, mode of production, physical activity, tobacco, drugs, environmental factors, and domestic and professional exposures.

Importantly, data from the NutriNet-Santé study are linked with medical and insurance records to improve accuracy regarding medications, diagnoses, and long-term sick leave. The study is financed entirely by public institutions.

 Source: Medical News Today