In 1546 Lucas Cranach the Elder painted The Fountain of Eternal Youth, a pool of purifying water into which women entered old on one side and left young on the other.
The mythical story captured by the German author is repeated in all kinds of cultures, ancient and modern, and includes the common human aspiration to never die.
This story was used by the scientist José María Ordovás during his presentation at the Food 4 Future event, held last week in Bilbao.
Ordovás, a researcher at Tufts University in Boston (USA), is one of the fathers of nutrigenomics and has spent decades studying the relationship between what we eat and healthy aging.
He does not believe that science will make us immortal,
The relationship between food and healthy aging was one of the topics of this meeting, in which you could find products, companies and professionals that try to respond to the needs and dilemmas around this fundamental element of human existence, a matter every more complex and interesting.
For much of our history, food was a rare commodity necessary to not die.
With this scarcity overcome in much of the world, eating what our bodies ask of us has become a way of dying before our time, and the production of this abundance threatens to cause an irreversible ecological disaster.
“Sustainability is a crucial aspect that the industry is working on, to use more sustainable materials and processes or to use less water and energy.
The world of the future cannot be like the world of today.
In Bilbao there was talk of food and, as always when talking about something important that involves human emotions, there was also guilt and fear.
Fear of the ecological apocalypse and guilt for having caused it are basic elements of the debate about the future of food.
"A meat hamburger pollutes more than your car," read a recent advertisement by the vegetable meat company Heura Foods, winner of the fair's ICEX award for the Spanish startup with the best international projection for being the company in its category that fast growing in Europe.
To avoid catastrophe, many companies, small and large, are showing their ingenuity to reduce the environmental impact of food.
According to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, 14.5% of global CO₂ emissions are associated with livestock.
As an alternative to traditional meat production, there are many companies that produce substitutes from vegetables or even try to cultivate it artificially, as Biotech Foods does, the company led by Íñigo Charola, who was also seen by the event.
Another company such as Insekt Label uses the larvae of the flour beetle (
Tenebrio molitor
), capable of producing protein with an efficiency twenty times greater than a cow, and some concentrate their efforts on the circular economy, producing vegan cheese from apricot waste or design lamps with the remains of orange peel.
In the future of food, the collective effects of our decisions are intertwined with the individual ones and all of them with the industrial and economic system.
Along with the environmental disaster, the success of humans and the capitalist system in reducing hunger and mitigating mortality from infectious diseases has had as a secondary effect a tremendous epidemic of non-communicable diseases.
Every year, one and a half million people die from diabetes, a disease associated with obesity, and cardiovascular diseases or cancer, which are advanced by a poor diet, are the main causes of death.
To combat these evils, the industry offers technology to obtain information and new products that replace the ultra-processed ones that clog supermarkets and our arteries.
But change is not inescapable or easy.
Sergi Fabregart, organizer of Food 4 Future, states that its function is to facilitate interaction between those who can create solutions to current problems, but recognizes that companies "need to have a return".
In his opinion, for this to happen, "consumers need to demand these healthier and more sustainable products and pay a price that can sometimes be higher."
This last factor is worrying because the lack of economic resources is related to greater obesity or diabetes.
At fairs such as Food 4 Future, organizations that build the future of food meet. Fernando Domingo-Aldama
On the information side, projects such as that of Isabel García, a researcher at Imperial College London and founder of Melico, stand out, a company that can accurately record what a person has eaten through the information they extract from urinalysis .
Now, both nutritionists trying to improve our eating habits and researchers who want to understand the effects of different diets in the general population have to rely on the results of surveys that study subjects answer, according to their memory or the mood of the moment they fill out the form.
“The biggest problem in nutrition is that you don't know what people eat, if the diet doesn't work or if the person doesn't follow it,” says García.
Projects like Garcia's are necessary to make personalized nutrition possible.
"The consumer wants hyper-personalized products, as happens with Spotify in music or Netflix in audiovisuals, so that they adapt to my food tastes, my lifestyle, my microbiota or how my metabolism reacts to food," Itziar points out. Nuts.
This would help put an end to the confusion that many people who do not find a low-carb or low-fat diet can have when they see that their neighbor does.
"Each person reacts differently to food, there is variability," adds Tueros.
That personalization would also help make it easier to follow the diets.
Nutritionists already know that when proposals seem individualized, they are followed more consistently.
In addition, systems such as the one proposed by Isabel García, provide instant information, and show that changes have rapid effects.
"We have seen that with 72 hours of following a very healthy diet, a change in the metabolic footprint is already seen," she explains.
It remains to be seen if that personalized and perfect information does not end up converting us by our own will into a kind of cattle with a perfect diet to keep us healthy, but with the fear of leaving the dietary fold, once again, constrained by fear and guilt. .
In the past,
During his presentation, Ordovás explained that nutrition experts look for places where people stay healthy for a long time and die very old, such as Okinawa in Japan, Nicoya in Costa Rica or Sardinia in Italy.
With the scientific mentality that has given so much success to Western civilization, they compartmentalize reality into understandable portions and observe the type of life they lead in those places or what they eat to try to determine what makes them long-lived and healthy.
This same mentality is what led Elie Metchnikoff, one of the fathers of modern immunology, to recommend yogurt as a way to prevent aging.
With remarkable insight,
he anticipated the relevance of the microbiome in our health and stated during a talk in 1904 that aging was caused by harmful bacteria that inhabit our intestines.
To combat it, it would be useful to eat a lot of yogurt, a food with beneficial bacteria that was consumed in abundance by the inhabitants of a Bulgarian region known for the longevity of its inhabitants.
Although Metchnikoff tried to nuance the anti-aging potential of yogurt highlighted by a journalist who attended the conference, the product experienced a great boom in consumption.
Now, turmeric, ginger, resveratrol or polyphenols found in chocolate, a food consumed by the long-lived inhabitants of the Caribbean island of San Blas,
The attraction to these easy solutions to a problem as worrying as the passage of time is intense, as shown by the universal success of myths such as those of the fountain of eternal youth or the universal panacea.
But the myths refuse to become reality.
"When we talk about functional foods, if you take, for example, omega 3 from fish and put it in foods that have nothing to do with it, perhaps cheaper or more consumed, you lose the idea of the food matrix," explains Miguel Ángel Martínez González, professor of public health at the University of Navarra, who did not attend Food 4 Future.
This complex relationship between all the elements that are in a food and that makes them have a different effect than when they are taken separately, means that when certain compounds are put in capsules,
In addition, Martínez González warns against the risk that some vegetable substitutes for other meats, apparently more sustainable and healthy, have the same problem as ultra-processed ones made with products of animal origin.
"There are many studies that show that ultra-processed products, those products in which the original food is not recognized, that are highly transformed, are very cheap, have a long shelf time and are very pleasant to the palate, are doing a lot of damage," he points out. the investigator.
“When you talk about sustainability, you have to think of something that is more plant-based and more in line with the Mediterranean diet, which is healthy and sustainable,” he concludes.
In an issue as broad and complex as food, geopolitics could not be missing from Food 4 Future.
In the globalized world, the war in Ukraine is also going to affect the global food distribution system, an issue that was dealt with in a Caixabank report presented at the event.
Judith Montoriol, coordinator of the report, explained that "the war or China's covid 0 regulations are already affecting the agri-food industry, where 18% already have production problems due to material shortages."
This has led to the relaxation of controls on GMOs or fallow regulations, in order to maintain the supply of animal feed.
Montoriol believes that Spain, "a great producer of agri-food", will resist well,
but remember that the FAO "has already alerted the problem of food security faced by the countries of North Africa."
Precisely, as has been seen in other areas such as energy, where the objectives of reducing the consumption of fossil fuels have been relaxed, it is possible that the war will reduce the incentives of the agri-food industry to accelerate the changes towards a more sustainable model, more even when it is a sector that works very well and has a very important weight in the Spanish economy.
"Agri-food exports account for 60,000 million euros for Spain and have grown by 11% in the last year," recalls Montoriol, who emphasizes that for this production to be maintained, progress must be made towards a more sustainable model.
As has been seen in other areas such as energy, where the objectives of reducing the consumption of fossil fuels have been relaxed, it is possible that the war will reduce the incentives of the agri-food industry to accelerate the changes towards a more sustainable model, even more so when It is a sector that works very well and has a very important weight in the Spanish economy.
"Agri-food exports account for 60,000 million euros for Spain and have grown by 11% in the last year," recalls Montoriol, who emphasizes that for this production to be maintained, progress must be made towards a more sustainable model.
As has been seen in other areas such as energy, where the objectives of reducing the consumption of fossil fuels have been relaxed, it is possible that the war will reduce the incentives of the agri-food industry to accelerate the changes towards a more sustainable model, even more so when It is a sector that works very well and has a very important weight in the Spanish economy.
"Agri-food exports account for 60,000 million euros for Spain and have grown by 11% in the last year," recalls Montoriol, who emphasizes that for this production to be maintained, progress must be made towards a more sustainable model.
even more so when it is a sector that works very well and has a very important weight in the Spanish economy.
"Agri-food exports account for 60,000 million euros for Spain and have grown by 11% in the last year," recalls Montoriol, who emphasizes that for this production to be maintained, progress must be made towards a more sustainable model.
even more so when it is a sector that works very well and has a very important weight in the Spanish economy.
"Agri-food exports account for 60,000 million euros for Spain and have grown by 11% in the last year," recalls Montoriol, who emphasizes that for this production to be maintained, progress must be made towards a more sustainable model.
What food is in the future and how we produce it will largely determine our future in every way.
Social awareness regarding individual health at times and fear or guilt at others will help direct industry decisions, determined by economic benefit, towards healthier and more environmentally friendly production.
Ordovás was convinced shortly after his talk that health sells, and when something sells, the industry usually shows a great capacity to provide it.
In addition, technological innovations to have more information about the effects of food will give consumers tools to know if marketing promises are based on reality.
It should not be ruled out, however,
