The large concomitant uncertainties affect how scientists and health authorities define and interpret recommendations and guidelines and how the industry is consequently pushed toward innovation and reformulation. On top of these problems, nutrition research needs to tackle the challenge of combining with diets and health entirely new sets of highly variable biological and non-biological covariates, such as intestinal microbiota at the molecular scale and behavioral contagion at the population level. ![]() This “follow the individual” approach presents many known methodological problems associated with time, cost, the internal and external validity of the sample, uncertainty of exposure, and individual variability in physiological response. Methodologically, subjects are selected at random from a population, categorized according to their exposure (for instance, dietary habits, known confounding factors, etc.), and their health status monitored over time. This approach seeks to link nutrients and other substances in food with individuals' health and disease. Traditionally, analytical epidemiology, and especially cohort studies, have relied on exploring multiple time- and exposure-related associations, while having fundamental shortcomings when it comes to proving causation. Nutritional science is largely based on observational evidence that is often subject to many confounding factors. We round off the paper by outlining some specific research directions that would make it possible to find new correlations and, possibly, causal relationships across scales and to answer pressing questions in the area of sustainable and healthy nutrition.Ĭomplex Interactions and Confounding Factors To illustrate the importance of this methodological innovation we focus on the consumption aspects of nutrition rather than production, but we recognize the importance of system-wide studies that involve both these components of nutrition. Specifically, we advocate for the adoption of interdisciplinary, complex-systems-based research to tackle the huge challenge of dealing with an evolving interdependent system in which there are multiple scales-from the metabolome to the population level-, heterogeneous and-more often than not- incomplete data, and population changes subject to many behavioral and environmental pressures. ![]() Focusing here primarily on nutrition and health, we discuss what kind of methodological shift is needed to open current disciplinary borders to the methods, languages, and knowledge of the digital era and a system thinking approach. This is because the confluence of these fields, whose methodologies have experienced explosive growth in the last few years, promises to solve some of the more challenging problems in sustainable and healthy nutrition, i.e., integrating food and behavioral-based dietary guidelines. Research in the field of sustainable and healthy nutrition is calling for the application of the latest advances in seemingly unrelated domains such as complex systems and network sciences on the one hand and big data and artificial intelligence on the other. ![]() 8Department of Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain.7Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain. ![]() 6Institute of Gastroenterology, Nutrition and Liver Diseases, Schneider Children's Medical Center and Lea and Arieh Pickel Chair for Pediatric Research, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.5Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom.4Borneo Futures, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei.3Department of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States.2Human Nutrition Unit, Food and Drug Department, University of Parma, Parma, Italy.Alberto Aleta 1 *, Furio Brighenti 2, Olivier Jolliet 3, Erik Meijaard 4,5, Raanan Shamir 6, Yamir Moreno 1,7,8 and Mario Rasetti 1
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