Food and nutrient exposures what to consider when evaluating epidemiologic evidence

Arezoo Rezazadeh

Assistant Professor,

Community Nutrition Department, National Nutrition and Food Technology Research Institute ,Faculty of Nutrition Sciences and Food Technology
Shahid Behehshti University of Medical Sciences

Nutritional Epidemiology

Epidemiology has been defined as the study of the patterns of disease occurrence in human populations and of the factors that influence those patterns.
Nutritional epidemiology is therefore the study of the nutritional determinants of disease .
Most of nutritional epidemiology is concerned with effects of diet on chronic diseases that are multifactorial (ie, nutrition is only one of many factors that cause the disease to occur) and that take years, if not decades, to develop.
The methods used in nutritional epidemiology are designed to take those features into account.
They focus on measuring the exposure to nutritional factors, the frequency and distribution of disease, and the exposure to other factors that could confound the hypothesized association.

Nutritional exposures

Nutritional exposures are defined or measured through the intake of:

Foods, nutrients (total from foods and supplements or separately from these 2 sources)
Non nutrients, additives, contaminants, and chemicals

Nutritional exposures also include:

Biochemical measures of nutritional status,
Biomarkers of intake, biological intermediates influenced by diet (eg, serum cholesterol concentration),
Anthropometric measurements,
Genetic factors,
Clinical findings.