Report on conference by Dr. K. Gedrich

On Tuesday January 31st, I attended a conference given by Dr. Kurt Gedrich, visiting lecturer from the Technische Universität München organized by the Department of Public Health of the University of Gent, under the frame of the European HELENA research project. The title of the conference was “Determination of food-based dietary guidelines and individual dietary advice by means of mathematical optimization”

The lecture described the experience of applying advanced linear programming methods to evaluate the dietary behaviour of Germans. The methodological approach was clear, and provided lots of insights for using it in nutritional epidemiology. Dr. Gedrich evaluated how the actual food intake of Germans (differentiated by gender) complies or not with the national nutritional recommendations. I was surprised to learn that apparently women comply less than men with the recommendations. I always thought that women overall ate better than males. That is not the case in Germany.

Another important issue that came out is that consumption of foods of plant origin, particularly vegetables, needs to improve in Germany, and I would say, this can be generalised to most places of the world. Yet the dietary behaviour of Germans is much healthier than the US population (that was the comparison used). The main public health recommendation of the study is to provide dietary guidelines separately for men and women, as at aggregated level the population appears to be closer to the recommendations than it is in reality.

The discussion after the presentation was also very challenging, and the main point raised is that still the nutritional recommendations need to be better supported by data, and how difficult is for the MD’s to translate them into understandable language to the population.

I enjoyed the approach, the whole study, the atmosphere, and definelty the sandwiches that were kindly offered by the organisers. Of course, I would like to apply this kind of methods in the future, but it won’t be soon! This kind of scientific interchange should happen more often.