New study about Nordic diet and its benefits
The published SYSDIET (one of Nordic center of excellence) study suggests that it is possible to establish a healthy Nordic diet based on the Nordic dietary recommendations and using Nordic food, but the Nordic raw materials, ingredients and products must be documented and characterized.
The Mediterranean diet is the best known dietary pattern, but the definitions of the Mediterranean diet are unclear, therefore it has not obtained a health claim (EFSA Journal 2011, 9(6), 19 pp) on cardiac function. A competitive advantage for the Nordic countries will be to identify the content and quality of nutrients and compounds with physiological activity in Nordic food from raw materials to effect on health, i.e. follow the content and quality along the value chain.
The challenges are information about food composition from food composition tables (FCT) which is incomplete. A poster at the final symposium for Nordic Center of Excellence – Food, Nutrition and Health on March 14 to 15 2013 in Copenhagen, Denmark we tried to illustrate the challenges exemplifies by water soluble vitamins and phytochemicals in plant food.
We concluded that the vitamin C content in fruit and vegetables can vary according to varieties and growing condition. It is very sensitive to degradation during processing. The vitamin C content recorded in Food Composition Tables can therefore be very misleading. Other phytochemicals are not recorded in these FCT neither in raw materials nor in processed products. Fresh plant foods must be characterized, and there is a need of documentation on the effects of food processing, in vitro and in vivo bioactivity and health effects. More documentation is needed on health-related quality through the value-chain.
<media 803> Poster - Characterization of the Nordic Food – a competitive advantage for the Nordic countries by P. Baardseth, S. Grimmer and G. I. Borge, Nofima</media>
For more information, please contact Pernille Baardseth, project manager, pernille.baardseth@nofima.no
Read more about the SYSDIET stydy here
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