Nutritional Ecology and Human Health

Abstract

The global rise in the incidence of obesity and associated non-communicable chronic diseases has far outstripped the ability to understand and manage the causes. We introduce a field from the natural sciences, called nutritional ecology, which we believe can contribute toward unraveling the causes of and identifying key control points for managing the growing epidemic of chronic disease. We begin by clarifying how we use the term “nutritional ecology” to place it in the context of related terms, emphasizing that ours is a biologically inspired approach that can help to structure nutrition research by introducing into nutrition science theory and methods from ecological and evolutionary sciences. We then discuss some biological insights from nutritional ecology that we suggest can make a significant contribution to nutrition research and clinical practice and thereafter introduce a geometric framework for implementing this theory. We end with examples showing that the implementation of biological thinking via nutritional geometry can provide a concrete step toward understanding how human biology interacts with our radically altered industrialized food environments to generate health and disease.