Kunnskap om tradisjonellt kosthold

Sammendrag

Is it fair to blame Western food habits for today's life-style diseases? Should people consume less fat and more carbohydrate to avoid health problems, or the opposite? Why has obesity-  become a world-wide epidemic? What are healthy and unhealthy dietary components? Nutritionists give conflicting answers to such questions, and experimental research on how single nutritional factors, tested one by one, affect isolated biological processes, is hardly the most rewarding strategy for developing reliable answers. Never-­the-­less, science-based nutrition research gets the last word in discussions on official dietary recommendations and nutrition policies. The paper discusses why reliable and reproducible experimental data can be interpreted differently, and hence lead to conflicting answers to questions related to how modern food habits and individual dietary components affect human health.-  It is suggested that the likelihood of different science-based opinions should be tested against knowledge on traditional food habits and ancestral diets. Such knowledge will contribute with a necessary bird's-eye-view on an insurmountable amount of experimental details produced by modern nutrition science.