Nutritional Methodologies and Modelling

Dietary surveys are useful for tracking population nutritional status and assessing the relationship between diet and health. Dietary evaluation can be used to characterise the types and amounts of food and dietary components consumed, as well as potential risk exposure. A growing number of researchers are merging genomes, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics approaches into nutritional science, resulting in a data explosion. However, it is currently unclear how classic nutritional research tools such as indirect calorimetry, nutrient balance, body composition evaluation, and isotopic tracer approaches may be used to relate these high-dimensional datasets to the physiological characterisation of phenotype. Nutrition studies focus on the processes through which a living organism obtains and utilises the elements required for survival and good health. The field of nutritional modelling is quite diverse, and no one mathematical formalism currently enables for the generation of the requisite integrated quantitative understanding of nutrition.