Considering the present situation, what aspect are more important for future food security i.e. on which to be research focus?
In 1996 FAO described food security as a situation in which: “all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious foods that guarantee their needs and food preferences to lead an active life and healthy." The limit of this declaration is not so much in having adequate quantities of food for people, allowing physical, social, and economic access. These are problems related to the policy implemented by the various governments and the solution is political. The limit is in having safe and nutritious foods. Safe means mainly free of toxic effects determined by the environment or production methods, e.g. with the storage. Nutrients mean that they must have a balanced composition that provides all the bio-compounds necessary for a healthy turn without the disease. In my opinion, the scientific limit is in these last two terms: safe and nutritious. The effects on humans of safety and good quality are studied from their metabolic effects. Knowledge of human metabolism is still reduced and studied with inadequate methodologies. Measuring the levels of particular metabolites in the blood is a very common approach, but a metabolite can have many different origins and give misleading information. It is a necessary aspect but it must be supported and explained by going down, at the genomic level. It needs to study the effect of food through the expression of genes and their derivatives (proteins) in the various tissues or cell systems; to study by interactomics the functional relationships between genes and proteins etc. from a much more precise overview. Human metabolism is a unique homeostatic system, which fully responds to external disturbances, it is not a compartmentalized system. The epigenetic effects of nutrients should be studied and classified because they are still little known. This, in my opinion, means to focus research on food safety. by knowing the metabolic effects of food in depth.
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