© International Epidemiological Association 2003; all rights reserved.

International Journal of Epidemiology 2003;32:486–488

DOI: 10.1093/ije/dyg216

EDITORIAL

Nutritional epidemiology—past, present,

future
Karin B Michels

Mostly, mothers are concerned about food. Mothers tell you their diet prior to a particular time in the past, and cases are
what to eat and what not to eat, how much of it to eat or not asked to recall their diet prior to the date of their diagnosis.
eat, when to eat it, and why you should or should not eat it. Remembering past diet is difficult, participants’ reports are influ-

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Mothers seem to know. The question is, who knows more about
good nutrition, mothers or nutritional epidemiologists?
Knowledge and common wisdom about the importance of diet
have been handed down from generation to generation for
millennia. While the formal study of diet and health is only a few
decades old, the importance of diet to maintain health was already
known to the ancient Greeks. As Hippocrates (460–377 BC), the
father of Western medicine, put it: ‘If we could give every
individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not
too little and not too much, we would have found the safest
way to health.’1
The first population-based studies collecting information on
nutrition were conducted in the 20th century. Data on only a
few foods were collected generally and were cross-classified with
disease outcomes.2,3 More detailed dietary assessment instru-
ments were subsequently developed, the most popular of which
are the 24-hour recall, a food diary kept for several days, and
the food frequency questionnaire (FFQ).4
Nutritional epidemiology is one of the younger disciplines in
epidemiology. This may be partially due to the difficulties in
measuring diet as an exposure. Diet and physical activity are
arguably the most difficult exposures to assess in observational
research and are plagued by considerable measurement error.5
We all eat, we all eat many different foods, we tend to forget
rather quickly what we ate, and we often do not know the
ingredients of the dishes we consume. Hence we are all exposed,
and the variation may be more subtle than with other, more
distinct exposures such as smoking or use of hormone replace-
ment therapy. Few people maintain extreme diets; thus
assessing diet within fairly homogeneous populations makes it
difficult to detect associations between dietary patterns (or
particular foods and nutrients) and health or disease due to the
lack of sufficient variation.
Over the past couple of decades, a large number of obser-
vational studies have attempted to elucidate the role of diet in
health and disease.6 Most of these studies were based on a case-
control design. Unfortunately, case-control studies of diet are
generally problematic since participants are asked to remember
enced by their current diet, and the differential recall among
diseased and non-diseased individuals presents an inherent bias
that is difficult to overcome. Prospective cohort studies with real-
time assessment of diet offer the best opportunity to gather valid
and reliable information on nutrition.
Can humans be randomized to strict diet schemes? Historic-
ally, the first controlled trials of which we are aware were
dietary interventions. Reference to a dietary trial was made in
the Bible: Daniel and his friends were to be trained at court and
assigned a daily allowance of food and wine from the royal
table.7 Daniel, determined not to contaminate himself, convinced
the guard to give them only vegetables to eat and water to drink
for 10 days. At the end of the 10 days they looked healthier and
were better nourished than all the young men who had lived on
the food assigned to them by the king. So the guard put aside
the food and wine that was allocated to them and gave them
vegetables.
In 1747, Captain James Lind on the HMS Salisbury, found
himself losing his sailors to a mysterious disease. Suspecting that
dietary deficiency was the culprit, he decided to allocate six
different diets to 12 of his crew members.8 Everyone received
the same basic diet, but each of the six groups received different
additional foods. One group was given oranges and lemons.
This group quickly recovered from the mysterious disease later
identified as scurvy.8

Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, 677

Huntington Avenue, and Obstetrics & Gynecology Epidemiology Center,
Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 221 Longwood The author and her mother discussing important aspects of a healthy
Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA. E-mail: kmichels@rics.bwh.harvard.edu diet

486
 NUTRITIONAL EPIDEMIOLOGY—PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
Captain Lind’s experiment may be one of the few examples
of a dietary allocation that worked. It was a short-term inter-
vention that led to fast recovery from a disease. Randomized
controlled allocation of diet is likely to be successful only for
severe dietary deficiencies that can be reversed in a short period
of time, or for allocation of dietary supplements. Studying the
effects of dietary composition on long-term health using
randomization presents a serious challenge. Ethical principles
do not permit randomizing individuals to a diet that, according
to scientific evidence, may have harmful effects. Participants
can be randomized only to maintaining their diet or to a diet
with uncertain impact on the health outcome of interest.
Adhering to an altered diet over an extended time period
presents an unreasonable challenge for most people, and suf-
ficient differences in diet between intervention and control
group are extremely difficult to maintain.9
What then have we learned from observational studies—
in particular, prospective cohorts—about the effect of diet on
health? We have been able to determine that diet plays an
important role in coronary heart disease prevention with
transfats, saturated fats, and a high glycaemic index promoting
heart disease and a diet high in fibre, fish oil, and poly-
unsaturated fats decreasing the risk.10 Not surprisingly, diet has
been found to be a crucial factor in the aetiology of type 2
diabetes.11 One of the most important questions that remains
unanswered is what role diet plays in cancer aetiology. Few
dietary components have been convincingly linked to cancer
outcomes. Red meat consumption has been fairly consistently
related to colorectal cancer incidence,12 and alcohol consumption
seems to increase the risk of a number of cancers.6 Biologically,
nutrients could have anticarcinogenic and carcinogenic effects
based on their possible influence on oxidation, methylation,
DNA repair and other capacities—possibly affecting initiation,
promotion, and progression of cancer. Thus far, however, these
theoretical properties of nutrition have failed to translate into
detectable effects.
The observed lack of association between diet and cancer
could have a number of explanations. It is possible that diet
plays only a minor role in cancer prevention. Alternatively, if
a modest association exists, measurement error in dietary
intake may conceal it. A true reduction or increase in cancer
risk of 10–30% may be impossible to detect. Furthermore,
insufficient variation in diet among the study population may
not permit meaningful comparisons. An important difference,
however, in the aetiology of heart disease and type 2 diabetes
and that of cancer is the long latency in the development of
tumours. Initial malignant transformations and clinically
manifest cancer may be separated by several decades. For
dietary factors to act in this lengthy process, long-term diet and,
possibly, nutrition during early periods of life may be
relevant.13
Where do we go from here? Hopefully towards accurate
methods of assessment and analyses of nutritional data, towards
identifying the role of diet at various times in life, and towards
systematically studying populations with large variations in
diet. Statistical models of diet—disease relations have focused
on the role of individual foods and nutrients. Foods and
nutrients, however, are not consumed in isolation. Our diet
consists of a variety of foods and nutrients that are consumed in
varying amounts according to individual preferences. Interactions
487
of food constituents in their impact on health and disease are
likely. Recent attempts to incorporate dietary patterns into our
analytical models have explored the possibilities that factor
analysis, principal component analysis, cluster analysis, and diet
scores have to offer. While identifying patterns or scores that
relate to health is relevant for public health recommendations,
they are less relevant for understanding underlying mechanisms.
Revealing possible gene—diet interactions may provide new
insights into the effects of nutrition, which might allow targeted
dietary interventions. Moreover, Mendelian randomization may
prove more powerful and allow detection of the main effect of a
genotype, which mimics the influence of the dietary factor.14
Nutritional epidemiology has focused on the role of diet
during adulthood; few studies have considered early life diet.
Chronic diseases may well originate in childhood and nutrition
during these early periods may have long-lasting consequences.
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Tissues may be particularly susceptible to the influence of nutrients
during periods of growth, the effect of diet may be cumulative,
and the long-term impact may only translate into disease
decades later. There is a need to examine diets at various times
in life and with long follow-up, especially for studies of cancer.
It is possible that the aforementioned lack of variation in diet
in the populations studied presents a crucial obstacle in identi-
fying the true role of diet in health and disease. Most participants
in epidemiological studies follow a diet without major restric-
tions. Migrant studies have taught us that environmental
factors are major contributors to most chronic diseases, inde-
pendent of the genetic background of the population. Cancer
rates change dramatically in populations migrating from
countries of sparse nutrition to those of more affluence. Though
other environmental factors probably play an important role,
the influence of dietary changes is likely. Moreover, countries
experiencing changes in dietary trends also see differences in
chronic disease rates; in Japan, where diet has changed from
one based mostly on plants and fish to a more Westernized diet,
cancer rates are on the rise.
Dietary regimens more extreme than vegetarianism or high
fruit, vegetable, and fibre consumption have been explored in
Europe. The potential therapeutic effect of nutrition on chronic
disease was described a century ago. Patients with severe gastro-
intestinal diseases and rheumatoid arthritis recovered after
interventions consisting largely of raw fruit, berries, vegetables
(salad and roots), nuts, and freshly ground whole grains.15,16
Although these observations were case series rather than the
results of comparisons within properly conducted observational
studies, this work provides valuable clues about the role of diet.
The results from population-based observational studies have
not provided the relevant data on whether a more restricted
diet consisting of fresh, ‘living’, and whole foods including freshly
ground whole grains, plant proteins, and a large variety of
organic and/or biodynamically grown raw fruits and vegetables,
as for example practised among the anthroposophic com-
munity,17 might have a profound effect on cancer incidence.
The potential beneficial effect of such living raw plant foods is
not explained by the caloric energy it provides (which is chaotic
heat) but rather its ‘ordered’ energy which, according to the
laws of physics, can store information and therefore promote
healing.18 Well-designed epidemiological studies among popu-
lations following such extreme diets are warranted and may
provide invaluable insights.
488 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY
Measuring dietary intake in large populations remains a
challenge. In an attempt to reduce the misclassification inherent
in diet assessment, measurement error correction models have
been developed but are seldom used.19–21 Biomarkers of nutrient
intake represent the optimal standard for calibration of
questionnaire-based diet assessment methods, as the errors of
the two methods are uncorrelated and therefore a true reduc-
tion of the questionnaire errors should be possible. Unfortu-
nately, biological markers are currently not available for most
nutrients, but much hope is held for their development.
Another issue of concern in nutritional epidemiology is
confounding. Individuals who try to eat a healthy diet are likely
to lead a healthy lifestyle in general. It is probably not possible
to measure all important markers of a healthy lifestyle suf-
ficiently to eliminate confounding. The inability to distinguish
the effect of diet from that of other lifestyle factors may pose a
threat to the validity of diet—disease associations observed in
epidemiologic studies.
In the meantime, most observations made in nutritional
epidemiology would not surprise your mother. There are a few
exceptions. The identification of transfatty acids in (partially)
hydrogenated oils and vegetable shortening and their hazardous
effect on health has been one of the most important findings in
nutritional research.22 Furthermore, the distinction between
‘good’ and ‘bad’ fats is a significant contribution to shaping the
optimal diet.23 Mother, however, told you a long time ago that
refined carbohydrates are bad for you and whole grains are the
way to go. At least my mother did.
Acknowledgement
Dr Michels is supported by Research Grant R01 DK54900-02
‘Methodologic Issues in Nutritional Epidemiology’ from the
National Institutes of Health in the USA.
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