Dilemmas of Nutrition and World Strategic Trends of Development of Foodstuffs

Abstract

Nutrition history of mankind can probably be divided into five macro periods. The early stage can be characterized by acquiring the eatable goods of nature which was followed by a simple food production with the aim of self-sufficiency. The new age till the middle of 20th century has been hallmarked firstly by determination of energy and nutrient demand which has widened with the food safety in the second half of 20th century, and nowadays it is the beginning of the period of health-protective, so called functional foods. The five stages altogether embrace about 2.5-3 million years, but the periods of subsequent stages became shorter and shorter. Dilemmas of nutrition are mainly caused by the contradictions of nutritional recommendations. The basic problems of the world’s population are, on the one hand, the deficiency diseases due to famine and underfedness, and on the other hand, in the industrially developed states the overfedness due to welfare and so called civilization diseases caused by pollution of environment. According to the latest statistical survey of FAO recently from the total 6.2 thousand million inhabitants of the world 840 million (13.5%) are starving. In both extremities the dilemmas of nutrition can be grouped around the topics of the human-physiological estimation of dietary fats, the frequent judging of allergy and intolerance by the same standard, cancer, osteoporosis and homocysteinemia which are embraced as halo by the epidemiological and global nutritional-health paradoxes. The development of foodstuffs has been carried out in three directions all over the world: they are the functional (a), organic (b) and national (c) foods. Foods belonging to the first two groups are in close connection with the human health while the national foods are tourist-enticing and represent the diversity contrary to food globalization. Increase of the market share of all these three food groups highly exceed that of traditional, so called generic foods.