NIH effort seeks to identify measures of nutritional status

Pandora's Box.

The National Institutes of Health has undertaken a new program to discover, develop and distribute measures of nutritional status. The Biomarkers of Nutrition for Development (BOND) Program brings together experts in the field of nutrition to provide advice to researchers, clinicians, program — and policymakers, on the role of food and nutrition in health promotion and disease prevention.

The BOND program seeks to identify nutritional biomarkers — substances that indicate how much of a nutrient a person has eaten and how the body is using that nutrient. Such biomarkers may be used to gauge:

how much of the nutrient someone has eaten (nutrient exposure)
whether the person is deficient, adequate, or has too much of a nutrient (status)
the role a nutrient serves in the body (function)
how a person or group responds to a treatment or intervention (effect)
Biomarkers may be direct measures of substances found in the body, such as a protein in the blood, or a substitute measure, such as height or bone density, which indicates a nutrient’s effect. Biomarkers can be used to assess the nutritional status of a person or a population.

The BOND Program is a partnership involving the NIH and support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, European Micronutrient Recommendations Aligned, the Micronutrient Genomics Project and PepsiCo. The BOND Program also involves collaborations with numerous U.S. and global health agencies and private organizations.

"Proper nutrition is essential for maintaining health and preventing disease," said the project officer for the BOND program, Daniel J. Raiten, Ph.D., of the Endocrinology, Nutrition and Growth Branch at the NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). "The BOND program is committed to developing nutritional biomarkers that are accurate and can be used to assess nutrition across a variety of different settings."

Prepare for a whole new set of problems.