Measuring health promotion: translating science into policy

Abstract

Commonly, it is the end of life when our health is deteriorating, that many will make drastic lifestyle changes to improve their quality of life. However, it is increasingly recognized that bringing good health-promoting behaviors into practice as early in life as possible has the most significant impact across the maximal healthspan. The WHO has brought clarity to health promotion over the last fifteen years, always centering on language relating to a process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their physical, mental and social health. A good healthspan is not just freedom from morbidity and mortality, it is that joie de vivre (“joy of living”) that should accompany every day of our lifespan. Therefore, health promotion includes not only the health sector, but also needs individual commitment to achieve that target of a healthspan aligned with the lifespan. This paper explores health promotion and health literacy, and how to design appropriate nutritional studies to characterize contributors to a positive health outcome, the role the human microbiome plays in promoting health and addressing and alleviating morbidity and diseases, and finally how to characterize phenotypic flexibility and a physiologic resilience that we must maintain as our structural and functional systems are bombarded with the insults and perturbations of life.

A Novel Personalized Systems Nutrition Program Improves Dietary Patterns, Lifestyle Behaviors and Health-Related Outcomes: Results from the Habit Study

“…Moving from population-based programs to personalized recommendations and claims is new to many regulators. Personalized approaches can align to and support adherence to population-based guidance, which may help personalized programs gain greater acceptance [ 13 , 91 ].…”

Science-based policy: targeted nutrition for all ages and the role of bioactives

“…In 2020, the CRN-I symposia occurred as a series of virtual webinars. Previous symposia have focused on optimal nutrition [ 102 ], healthy ageing [ 60 , 76 ], and health promotion [ 43 ]. For this paper, academic researchers have presented on the need for adequate protein and amino acid consumption, and the debilitating problem of sarcopenia should adequate intake be compromised.…”

“… This is the eleventh CRN-International conference report. Previous conference reports were published in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology [ 104 ] and for the last nine years in the European Journal of Nutrition [ 2 , 8 , 43 , 60 , 66 , 70 , 71 , 76 , 102 ]. …”

Modified WCRF/AICR Score and All-Cause, Digestive System, Cardiovascular, Cancer and Other-Cause-Related Mortality: A Competing Risk Analysis of Two Cohort Studies Conducted in Southern Italy

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