Project: Magazine - research updates in medical nutrition
VIEW magazine describes Danone’s food research activities in medical nutrition. This ongoing project requires me to create short articles based on current research findings.
The creative challenge is to take complex medical information and make it easy to understand for a general audience. I interact scientists as well as a marketing, design and communication team.
I enjoy writing about health topics and have prior experience of writing news articles for a Harvard University health publication.
What is medical nutrition?
Medical nutrition manages disease-related malnutrition and specific disease conditions in all age groups. It can make medical treatment more effective by controlling malnutrition, meeting special dietary needs, and can help to delay disease progression. We define it as nutritional intervention that improves clinical outcomes.
How do people take these products?
The products are administered via the gastrointestinal tract – taken orally as a beverage, soup, meal, or dessert, or through a feeding tube.
Is medical nutrition categorized as a food or pharmaceuticals?
The products are not classified as pharmaceuticals. Medical nutrition products are unique compositions of specific nutrients that cannot be obtained from a normal diet. Our products are ‘advanced nutrition’, and from a legislative perspective, they are classified as food.
How are these products distributed?
Medical nutrition products are usually prescribed or recommended by health care professionals, and in many markets are reimbursed by health insurance. They are distributed in hospitals, care homes, pharmacies, and special home-delivery channels.
Article: Health risk factors ‘switch on’ at conception
Researchers are finding that an expectant mother’s nutrition has a significant impact on her baby’s development and can trigger diseases such as cancer or diabetes later in life.
The following is an abstract of an interview with Professor Mark Hanson, Director of the Centre for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease at the University of Southampton.
What is epigenetics?
M.H.: From the moment of conception, our lives are influenced by interactions between the DNA that we inherited from our parents and our environment. This impacts how we develop before and after birth, and how we react to challenges such as an unbalanced diet later in life. Epigenetics refers to the chemical modification of gene expression without changes in the inherited DNA code sequence that mediates these gene-environment interactions.
There are different forms of epigenetic processes which influence how and when certain genes are ‘switched on’. For example, epigenetic processes are involved in normal development to reset the pattern of gene expression in early life for a person’s lifetime. They also play a role in the early stages of some forms of cancer. So they operate in both normal functions and disease.
Some people are at higher risk of chronic non-communicable disease than others. But only a small part of this risk is due to inherited genes – we now know that epigenetic processes greatly contribute to this risk.
How do epigenetic processes predict future health and disease risk factors?
M.H.: Epigenetic processes can be measured at birth and in childhood and they tell us two things. First, they indicate how the baby has developed before and soon after birth in response to their environment. Because this environment is largely influenced by the mother, the epigenetic ‘marks’ can tell us a great deal about the effects of the mother’s diet, her body composition, her stress levels, etc.
Secondly, early life factors play a major role in the risk of later chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and even some forms of cancer. So epigenetic marks measured at birth can provide clues about such risks at a later time in life, yet well before disease develops and when prevention is still possible.
Epigenetics is an advantageous tool in food development to ensure performance, health and to effectively monitor food safety. The research data also offers a basis for personalizing nutrition in relation to epigenetic processes. It is possible to ‘re-engineer’ the genetic profile for improved health and resistance to disease.
Click to download a sample page of VIEW:
