Channing Division of Network Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
Nat Commun. 2023 Jul 18;14(1):4316. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-39836-0.
Studying human dietary intake may help us identify effective measures to treat or prevent many chronic diseases whose natural histories are influenced by nutritional factors. Here, by examining five cohorts with dietary intake data collected on different time scales, we show that the food intake profile varies substantially across individuals and over time, while the nutritional intake profile appears fairly stable. We refer to this phenomenon as 'nutritional redundancy' and attribute it to the nested structure of the food-nutrient network. This network enables us to quantify the level of nutritional redundancy for each diet assessment of any individual. Interestingly, this nutritional redundancy measure does not strongly correlate with any classical healthy diet scores, but its performance in predicting healthy aging shows comparable strength. Moreover, after adjusting for age, we find that a high nutritional redundancy is associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
研究人类饮食摄入可以帮助我们确定有效的措施来治疗或预防许多受营养因素影响其自然病史的慢性疾病。在这里，通过检查五个具有不同时间尺度上收集的饮食摄入数据的队列，我们表明，食物摄入模式在个体之间和随时间变化显著变化，而营养摄入模式则相对稳定。我们将这种现象称为“营养冗余”，并将其归因于食物-营养网络的嵌套结构。该网络使我们能够量化每个人的任何饮食评估的营养冗余程度。有趣的是，这种营养冗余度量与任何经典的健康饮食评分都没有很强的相关性，但其在预测健康衰老方面的表现相当强。此外，在调整年龄后，我们发现高营养冗余与较低的心血管疾病和 2 型糖尿病风险相关。
