Fifty years ago, a group of prominent figures decided to shape the future and created the Nutrition Course at the University of Porto, which would become the embryo of a new profession in Portugal and a new and disruptive way of looking at the relationship between food and human health in our country
One way to celebrate five decades of this remarkable journey in Portuguese society and honor the memory of these visionaries is precisely by looking ahead again and together thinking about the future we want to build. This new future now carries 50 years of history, but that doesn't mean it can't be as bold and unconventional as it was in 1976, after a social, cultural, and political revolution that changed the life of the country.
In fact, we will only be the future if we know how to continue leading innovation, doing things differently and better, and changing things that have always been done that way...because that's how it was. Especially since the world has accelerated in the last 50 years, and the changes that have always happened are now happening at a faster pace.
Looking to the future therefore means observing the world and its new speeds
We continue to open our mouths for the same reasons we did in the past—for pleasure, for socialization, for biological necessity, or for cultural reasons—but now these choices are affected by a food system that is increasingly distant, yet complex, and more influenced by economic and political factors that we have more difficulty controlling.
Meanwhile, social and economic differences continue to explain significant differences in access to healthy food. Today, low-cost calorie surpluses have replaced the calorie scarcity among the most disadvantaged groups, which was still prevalent in the 1970s. But the social gradient continues to determine less healthy choices, and malnutrition continues to severely affect the most disadvantaged.
The same applies to access to information needed to make decisions. Quality and easily understandable information continues to fail to reach those who need it, no longer due to a scarcity of quality information, but now due to an abundance of poor-quality information. And due to the growing inability to distinguish between credible sources and decision-making support produced incorrectly.
Today we know more about how our daily food choices affect the health of the planet. And how the health of the planet will increasingly determine our diet and therefore our health.
Despite technological advancements, our understanding of food, its composition, and how it interacts with our bodies remains elusive. This is because foods are becoming increasingly processed and incorporating more and more ingredients.
Society is therefore very different, and nutrition and nutritionists of the future will have to be different, or they will not be part of this future.
The challenge we face is to build a profession that is attentive to the world and capable of jointly driving change at the different levels where it operates, so that the profession remains relevant and can contribute to the health and well-being of humankind and the planet.
The future will depend on understanding global food systems, on being an active and audible voice in a noisy and global world (how to do this?), on having a deep knowledge of food and the technology that increasingly modifies it, on understanding the relationship between food composition and human health at the individual level, all while maintaining the ability to understand and incorporate into daily practice the ethical imperative of combating inequalities caused by the inability to access healthy food, preserving the food identities of each region and the associated biodiversity, and protecting our planet and its ecosystems, which are the main guarantors of our health and quality of life.
The times ahead for nutrition will require working in multidisciplinary teams, disregarding the boundaries defined on maps, and integrating technology and food ethics into daily activities because the food system and environmental and social problems will be increasingly global, yet where, despite everything, human beings will remain the same as they were thousands of years ago.
We hope that this space for discussion will help us think about the development of a profession that, as long as human beings continue to speak, will always have a future.
Pedro Graça,
Director of the Faculty of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Porto
Written by
Pedro Graça, Director of the Faculty of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Porto