Frontiers in Nutritional Methodology Grand Challenge

Nutrition has been central to the progress and well-being of mankind. Nutritional treatments and interventions, nutritional public policy and guidelines, issues related to agriculture and the food supply, nutritional genomics for individualized treatments, and other such topics remain vital areas of scientific inquiry. The foundation of progress in science is rigorous methods. Many of our methods have improved substantially over the years, yet there are always healthy calls for ever greater rigor in nutrition research [1-3]. Ongoing advancement in methodological aspects of nutrition, energetics, and obesity studies include at least three components: a) observations and measurements, b) experimental design, and c) statistical analysis and interpretation. We challenge ourselves and the field to expand the frontiers of nutritional knowledge by advancing the breadth, the rigor, and the quality of use of scientific methods in nutrition-related research. The beginnings of modern medicine and nutritional science can be dated to the early 17th century, when the old ideas of the Four Humors Theory [4] were finally being questioned. Back then it was customary to attribute any disease to one of the four body humors without careful measurements or analysis. Jean-Baptiste van Helmont was one of the first investigators who chose to take detailed measurements. Incidentally, this was the same era in which Galileo questioned old Greek ideas and developed devices such as the thermometer, which van Helmont used to measure temperatures. Sanctorius further improvised this device to develop a clinical thermometer for examining sick individuals [4]. It was also during the 17th century when medically oriented scientists focused on developing microscopes, an advancement from the glass lens that had been developed since the 13th century. The invention of the microscope was critical to advancing our understanding of general medical science, including nutritional research. Indeed, microscopes were crucial in our understanding the processes of energy production and chemical interaction and in the study of animal fluids [5]. Analogously, in modern times, advances like the Google Glass [6] may set the stage for us to develop next-generation data collection methods and protocols. Our first challenge is to advance data collection methods by using an ensemble of cutting-edge technological advances from fields such as biophysics, bioengineering, psychometrics, nanotechnology, and biomaterials [7-10]. Studies to estimate measurement errors and biases in data collection techniques will