Positive Nutrition:

a new mindset to address the obesity epidemic and beyond.

Washington, DC — The Mediterranean Diet Roundtable® in collaboration with the Embassy of Italy, Cambridge Food Science, and the American Italian Food Coalition, cordially invite you to the symposium: “Positive Nutrition: Shifting the Focus from Nutrients to Diet for a Healthy Lifestyle,” to be held on Thursday, September 15, 2022, from 3:30 to 5:30 pm at the Embassy of Italy in Washington, DC (3000 Whitehaven Street NW, Washington, DC 20008), with a reception to follow.

The impact of the dietary choices on human health is gaining undivided attention, with an urgent call to action for developing new strategies able to contrast weight-related diseases as well as poverty. This symposium aims to provide an inclusive approach to adopting positive nutritional strategies, focusing on the long-term results and not on specific nutrients, moving the narrative to the whole lifestyle: sustainable dietary patterns, physical, and social activity as agents of change.

Since Hippocrates, food and medicine have been interlaced in many ways. But now more than ever, it is imperative to better understand these complex relationships, with a multidisciplinary approach able to create a cohesive relationship between food, nutrition, environment, economic, social, and policy aspects, creating a new narrative about eating patterns.

With the discovery of essential nutrients in the first half of the 20th Century, nutritionists began employing relatively short- or intermediate-term experiments for disease prevention. However, fad diets never contemplate the whole picture: e.g.: people eat complex foods, not individual nutrients; observational studies are unable to determine causality; there are serious difficulties to design, implement and fund long-term intervention trials.

A general scientific consensus endorses the Mediterranean eating pattern, its food matrix, lifestyle and societal variables, and environmental conditions contributing to long-term well-being. One result of such scientific investigations highlights the importance of avoiding stigmatizing this or that ingredient, and to focus on the whole meal and the right portion: a distinctive feature of the Mediterranean Diet as well as other traditional eating patterns.

Building on this science-based perspective, speakers at this symposium will discuss how public policy can help support whole diets, physical activity, and associated lifestyles.

Featured world-class scholars in the program include:

• Dennis Bier, Director of the USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine (USA)
• Hugo Da Costa Ribeiro, Federal University of Bahia (Brazil)
• Lorenzo Maria Donini, University La Sapienza (Italy)
• Paul Gately, Leeds Beckett University (UK)
• Daniela Martini, University of Milano (Italy)
• Rick Mattes, Perdue University (USA)
• Roberta Re, Director at Cambridge Food Science (UK)

The program will be organized in two sessions: Importance of Diets not individual ingredients – European and American Dietary Pattern: Nutrition/Nutrients/ Mediterranean Diet; followed by The Role of Portion in Dietary Pattern:  Energy balance, physical activity, portion size, and frequency of consumption.

“Nutritional science and nutritional policy cannot continue to ignore the interactions among diet, environment, lifestyle and health maintenance,” says Dennis Bier adding “In order to illuminate the full nutritional field for the future, we must shine light on all those variable interdependencies and their contributions to causal relationships among diet and disease prevention.” Roberta Re, Scientific Chair of the event states: “Dietary recommendation have promoted a restriction approach for several years, meanwhile level of obesity has continue rising across the globe. Are we tackling the problem with the right tools? A complex and multifaced problem such as obesity cannot be simplified to a single solution.”

Additional information about the speakers can be found by visiting www.MDRproject.com

Please RSVP by September 13, 2022 to: info@MDRproject.com