What are appropriate nutritional interventions for chronic-disease prevention?
Can targeted, personalized nutrition enhance health?
What are the most important biological factors that impact food choices?
These are among a host of partially unanswered questions that require new research evidence through collaboration, according to the National Nutrition Research Roadmap 2016-2021: Advancing Nutrition Research to Improve and Sustain Health. This first-ever nutrition Roadmap, recently served up by the Interagency Committee on Human Nutrition Research (ICHNR), provides the recipe to guide federal nutrition research priorities for the next five years. It urges all relevant federal departments and agencies to coordinate their human nutrition research programs, and encourages more effective collaboration among government, academia and public/private partnerships in order to fast-track discoveries using federal research dollars.
With the goal of improving and sustaining health for all Americans, the Roadmap is framed by these three key questions that cover a broad spectrum of inquiry likely to yield accelerated progress in nutrition research:
- How do we better understand and define eating patterns to improve and sustain health?
- What can be done to help people choose healthy eating patterns?
- How can we develop and engage innovative methods and systems to accelerate discoveries in human nutrition?
The Roadmap acknowledges that nutrition research now requires approaches that cross traditional health-related fields such as agricultural sciences, biochemistry, dietetics, dentistry, endocrinology, food technology, genetics, medicine, microbiology, molecular biology, physiology, and psychology. So if you’re hungry to begin collaboration in nutrition research, HSLS provides a buffet of resources and services. Begin with the menu of HSLS classes to learn how to find funding, manage research data, search databases, and more. When you’re ready for the main course, we recommend searching the PubMed and AGRICOLA databases. Next, select side-dishes from the nutritional sciences e-book collection, print books, and topic guides. As always, HSLS librarians are available to cater to your information needs, and dish out helpful suggestions for locating additional resources. (And we’re also happy to accept invitations to discuss your research over a nutritious lunch!)
–Rebecca Abromitis