Yesterday Professor Martijn Katan gave his farewell address as professor of nutrition at the department of health sciences and the EMGO Institute for health and care research. Before Martijn Katan's lecture there was a short symposium with two distinghuised invited speakers: Professors Jan Vandenbroucke and Marion Nestle. Marion Nestle presented her work on food politics and the relation between nutrition researcher, nutrtion researchers and food policies of governments and food industry. Vandenboucke and Katan himself spoke about the problems nutrition researchers face in establishing evidence-based practice. Martijn Katan used examples from his own research career - his world famous research on transfats and cafestol- to urge the future generation of nutrition researchers to go back to the reductionist approach, focussing in nutrients rather than foods or food patterns. I myself have argued that a focus on food patterns may be more fruitful; see for example the paper I wrote with Elling Bere on the Nordic Diet. However, Katan certainly has a point that internally valid research on the potential health promoting effects of food patterns is very difficult (Katan would claim it to be impossible, I think...).
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