Dear friends,
unfortunately, I had some eye problems at the season time period. Thus, I can only today wish you a successful 2017.
During the next years a prime emphasis will be given to food based dietary guidelines. Recommendations and guidelines had been the topics of the Belgrade workshop and the European perspectives on this issue will also been presented at our FENS workshop at the International Nutrition congress in Buenos Aires in October 2017. The topic was selected because food based dietary guidelines are seen as a major approach to improve dietary habits in a country. We see a demand in working conceptionally on this approach since some of the basic documents of the concept are older than one decade. New insights and thoughts need to be integrated in the existing considerations for shaping the future. A common framework concept for food based dietary guidelines should exist in Europe on which national recommendations could be derived with all possible modifications. It is a vision that such national or regional guides will be available in each country in the common years, supported and/or developed under the auspices of the respective Nutrition Society and their partners.
We thus have decided at the Belgrade Meeting to establish a FENS working group on Food based Dietary Guidelines composed of experienced experts on this issue and those members from the Nutrition Societies that could lead the implimentation of national FBDGs. We already have candidates for the South East European Region arising fron the Belgrad Workshop. Potentially, we see all FENS board members as further candidates. However, it will be the decision of each Nutrition Society to nominate a candidate. Please be aware that funds are limited and thus, the participation should be restricted to one person per Society. In the past, we already received some names of experts. Please, update this information and also nominate new candidates for this task if necessary. We also asked our sister Societies on European level ESPEN and EFAD to send a representative.
The working group will primarily exchange ideas and documents via telephone conferences and e-mails. In addition. at least a one day meeting seems necessary in the early summer period. We intend to closely collaborate with FAO and also IUNS in order to increase the Impact of our activity.
The initiative for a Working Group on FBDGs should be supplemented by a publicly available data base on literature that describe food intake-disease relationships. In our Department, a colleague is working to develope such a tool. We are inspired by the exposome Explorer. With our Drupal website, we have also the respective tool to realize such a system. We all have experienced that compiling the literature is a major task that could be shared between the societies. A first step could be that we collect Information about existing data bases already compiled for the various national initatives.
Please, send the attached form back to us.
My best regards
Heiner Boeing, FENS president ([email protected])