The global nutrition community faces an urgent imperative to address inequities in food security while promoting inclusive approaches to nutrition science and practice. The Nutrition Society of Australia’s 2024 Annual Scientific Meeting on ‘Food for All: Promoting Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Nutrition’ addressed this critical challenge through a 4-day programme of cutting-edge, multi-disciplinary research. The conference brought timely focus to key issues, including food access, cultural food practices, nutrition service accessibility, and inclusive research and education approaches. The conference featured public presentations, workshops, oral and poster sessions, symposia, and early career researcher sessions, and emphasised incorporating diverse perspectives while highlighting collaborative approaches to promoting equitable food systems. Coordinated efforts among researchers, healthcare providers, community organisations, industry partners and policymakers remain essential to advance inclusive nutrition practices and ensure equitable access to nutritious food for all populations.

The aim of this review is to examine why cultural food security and cultural food sovereignty should be prioritised and embedded within conventional food security frameworks. It demonstrates how culturally grounded, community-driven approaches foster more just, sustainable and empowering food systems for ethnically diverse, Indigenous and local communities, while highlighting the limitations of conventional metrics that overlook socio-cultural, political and ecological dimensions essential to resilience. Conventional food security focuses on access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food, often sidelining access to culturally appropriate and spiritually meaningful foods that are integral to cultural identity and tradition (cultural food security) and the authority and decision-making power held by local people over their foodways (cultural food sovereignty). Its market-based, individualistic measurement paradigms further neglect collectivist, traditional and spiritual food values, resulting in assessments that may conform to global standards yet produce flawed outcomes, misaligned interventions and continued marginalisation of ethnically diverse, Indigenous and local communities. Drawing on socio-cultural, political, economic and environmental frameworks, the review demonstrates how food sovereignty and cultural food security provide more sustainable, equitable and empowering pathways for communities. It underscores the need for community-driven, culturally grounded food policies.

By 2050, 1.31 billion people will be living with type 2 diabetes (T2DM). Those with social disadvantage experience greater diabetes prevalence, morbidity and mortality. Gestational diabetes (GDM) is an established factor for T2DM, with 3–4 times greater risks among women who are Black, Hispanic and South and South East Asians. Lifestyle interventions that include diet and physical activity reduce T2DM in at-risk populations, including women with prior GDM, regardless of ethnicity. However, migrant women from non-Western backgrounds are less likely to engage with the programme despite its efficacy. This review paper aims to describe the social disparities in GDM globally, with a focus on equity issues and interventions in Australia. It outlines a five-part approach to solutions that move us towards equity in reach and uptake for women from non-Western migrant backgrounds in Australia. Culturally inclusive solutions start with evaluating reach in underserved groups through equity audits or stratified analyses and identifying groups where reach is low. Community partnerships can then be formed with key actors across health and social sectors identified through stakeholder mapping. Effective reach strategies, including implementation and evaluation plans, will be co-developed through these partnerships, addressing risk factors, enablers and barriers to a healthy lifestyle. Solutions that integrate medical and social services, such as social prescribing, could facilitate healthy lifestyle choices through restructuring the social environment of the individual. These steps lead to interventions that promote social cohesion and resilience, enabling individuals to attain health and well-being in the face of external challenges.

Healthy diets are unaffordable for billions of people worldwide, with food prices rising in high-, middle- and low-income nations in recent times. Despite widespread attention to this issue, recent actions taken to inform policy prioritisation and government responses to high food inflation have not been comprehensively synthesised. Our review summarises (i) innovative efforts to monitor national food and healthy diet price, ii) new policy responses adopted by governments to address food inflation and (iii) future research directions to inform new evidence. Evidence synthesis. Global. None. We describe how timely food and beverage pricing data can provide transparency in the food industry and identify key areas for intervention. However, government policies that improve food affordability are often short-lived and lack sustained commitment. Achieving meaningful impact will require long-term, cross-sectoral actions that are led by governments to support food security, healthy diets and resilient sustainable food systems. This will necessitate a better understanding of how the political economy enables (or hinders) policy implementation, including through coherent problem framing, mitigating conflicts of interest in policymaking, working together as coalitions and developing and utilising evidence on the food security and related impacts of food pricing and affordability policies. Diverse actors must be better equipped with robust data platforms and actionable policy solutions that improve the affordability of healthy and sustainable diets, including by lowering food prices and addressing the broader socio-political determinants of food insecurity.

Personalised nutrition (PN) has emerged as an approach to optimise individual health outcomes through more targeted and tailored dietary recommendations based on unique genetic, phenotypic, medical, lifestyle and contextual factors. The application of artificial intelligence (AI) presents an opportunity to achieve personalised nutrition advice at a scale that has population impact. This review introduces a nutrition audience to different AI applications and offers insights into the concepts of AI that might be relevant to the field of nutrition research. The current and future uses of AI in PN are discussed, as well as the potential benefits and challenges to their application. AI-driven solutions have the potential to improve health and reduce the risk of disease because they can consider more information about an individual in making recommendations. However, challenges such as data interoperability, ethical considerations, and model interpretability remain an issue limiting widespread use at this point. This review will provide a foundational understanding of the application of AI within PN and help to identify opportunities to leverage the potential of AI in transforming dietary guidance and enhancing health outcomes through innovative solutions.

Indicators of environmental impact can be used to inform the production, promotion and consumption of sustainable diets. Most environmental impacts associated with food production occur on farm; thus, sustainable diets are reliant on sustainable agricultural practices. In this paper, we review the current use of environmental indicators and metrics from global to local scales and highlight the need for locally relevant definitions to inform sustainable diets. Using Australia as a case study, we show that the diversity of food production systems is accompanied by a diversity of environmental issues, including climate change, land scarcity, nutrient pollution, water scarcity and biodiversity loss, each uniquely affecting different systems. However, while global datasets and indicators provide a consistent basis for estimating impacts and enabling country and food product comparisons, they often fail to capture the nuances of food production at national and sub-national scales. For example, land use may be a poor indicator of biodiversity loss when grazing a natural, low-input rangeland. Similarly, water use is only relevant where there is competition for the resource and eutrophication only where there is an adjacent water system to pollute. Thus, reporting frameworks used to inform sustainable diets need to be based on indicators that consider the context of local systems to demonstrate the clear linkage and how specific farming systems can drive sustainable diets. The development of provenance and traceability systems means the tools are already available to track impacts at a regional, or even individual farm, level.

This review examines the relationship between diet and functional dyspepsia (FD), a prevalent disorder of gut–brain interaction affecting 8% of the global population and characterised by postprandial fullness, early satiety and epigastric pain or burning. Despite 40–70% of FD patients reporting symptom onset within minutes of eating, standardised dietary recommendations remain limited. The pathophysiological mechanisms underlying food-related symptoms in FD involve complex interactions between altered gastric accommodation and emptying, visceral hypersensitivity, duodenal immune activation and small intestinal microbial dysbiosis. Current evidence most strongly supports dietary lipids as potent triggers of dyspeptic symptoms, likely mediated through cholecystokinin pathways and heightened visceral sensitivity. Additionally, emerging research indicates potential benefits of fermentable carbohydrate restriction, with the low FODMAP (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols) diet showing promise particularly for patients with postprandial distress syndrome. Other dietary factors such as alcohol, coffee, food chemicals, bioactive compounds and meal patterns may also influence FD symptoms though current evidence remains insufficient to inform clinical practice. While existing evidence provides a foundation for understanding diet–symptom relationships in FD, significant gaps remain in translating mechanistic insights into personalised dietary recommendations. Future research should focus on developing evidence-based dietary strategies tailored to FD subtypes, ensuring nutritional adequacy while addressing the complex interplay between nutrient sensing, duodenal immune activation and gut microbiota in symptom generation.

Dietary patterns are prerequisites for health and integral components of ecological systems. For over a century researchers have been building a body of evidence of associations between dietary patterns and health and sustainability outcomes while policymakers have been synthesising and translating this evidence into policies to promote public health. During this period, food systems have dramatically changed and driven the emergence of food supplies and dietary behaviours with no ecological or evolutionary precedent. Now, the relevance of conventional nutrition research and policymaking approaches for understanding food system transitions and protecting against unhealthy and unsustainable diets is being questioned. This review aims to examine how the ecological nutrition paradigm might guide a transformed approach to nutrition research and policymaking to promote healthy and sustainable diets. It shows the ecological nutrition paradigm is transdisciplinary integrating biological, social and environmental dimensions into nutrition research and policymaking. The paradigm operates to a ‘fit-for-purpose’ policymaking orientation. It draws on ecological and evolutionary theories to provide insights to conceptualise the causes of, and solutions to, nutrition problems and help design relevant decision-making processes. These research and policymaking features contrast with the ‘one-size-fits-all’ policymaking orientation and prescriptive decision-making processes of the conventional medical nutrition paradigm. Their attention to a relevance criterion engenders confidence in the likely effectiveness, and ability to avoid unintended consequences, of policies informed within an ecological nutrition paradigm. The review proposes a shift to the ecological nutrition paradigm to transform nutrition research and policymaking for promoting healthy and sustainable diets is overdue.

The NOVA food classification system and its categorisation of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have significantly influenced dietary guidelines worldwide, yet the assumption that all UPFs are uniformly harmful warrants critical examination. Here, a review of evidence revealed substantial heterogeneity in health outcomes across UPF subtypes, with products like sugar-sweetened beverages consistently associated with adverse outcomes while fortified cereals and certain dairy products demonstrate neutral or protective effects. The binary nature of NOVA’s classification fails to account for nutritional composition, fortification benefits, and cultural food traditions, creating inconsistencies in categorisation across different contexts. Methodological limitations in UPF research include inadequate dietary assessment tools, selective reporting of negative findings, and experimental design flaws that conflate processing with other dietary factors. Implementation challenges extend to socioeconomic accessibility, as UPFs often provide cost-effective nutrients for disadvantaged populations and environmental sustainability, where wholesale reduction could increase resource demands. Future directions should develop more nuanced classification systems that integrate processing methods with nutritional quality to better inform public health strategies rather than categorically rejecting all UPFs.

Healthy ageing and longevity have emerged as urgent public health priorities amid global population ageing and declining birth rates. This review synthesises empirical evidence highlighting the essential role of diet and nutrition in preventing chronic diseases and supporting functional independence in later life. The review was organised using a problem-solving approach to address three core questions: ‘What’ evidence links food and nutrition with positive health outcomes; ‘Why’ do specific dietary components affect biological ageing – via mechanisms such as nutrient sensing, inflammation modulation and caloric restriction; and ‘How’ culturally tailored, person-centred dietary interventions should be developed for better adoption. Findings from centenarian populations suggest that low-energy (i.e. foods with low energy density, such as fruit and vegetables, whole grains), nutrient-rich and diverse diets may help prevent or delay age-related diseases, supporting the notion that food could be used as medicine. Moreover, addressing barriers such as food insecurity and limited access to culturally appropriate healthy food options, particularly in low-income and rural communities, is crucial for achieving equitable health outcomes. Finally, the review calls for integrating personalised nutrition strategies into clinical care and public health initiatives. These efforts can enhance healthspan, improve quality of life and reduce the broader social and economic burdens associated with ageing populations.

The 58th Annual Scientific Conference of the Nutrition Society of New Zealand, held in Christchurch in 2024, brought together 187 delegates under the theme ‘Kotahitanga: Bridging Research, Industry and Practice’. This theme reflected the society’s commitment to uniting diverse sectors to address key nutrition challenges across the life course. Kotahitanga refers to unity and collective action. Topics included nutrition in ageing and chronic disease, infant and toddler nutrition, gut health, sustainable food systems and food safety. Presentations on sarcopenia and Parkinson’s disease emphasised the need for greater awareness and tailored nutrition strategies for older adults. The Muriel Bell Lecture celebrated the legacy of New Zealand’s first State Nutritionist and called for continued leadership in evidence-based nutrition and encouraged nutritionists to communicate research to the public. A panel on science communication offered practical strategies for engaging the public and countering misinformation. The conference reinforced the importance of collaboration, advocacy and practical application in advancing nutrition.

The Mediterranean Diet (Med Diet) has long been shown to be associated with lower cardiovascular mortality in epidemiological studies. However, the direct effect of the dietary pattern on cardiovascular risk factors is less clear. Furthermore, the effect of Med Diet interventions in non-Mediterranean populations on cardiovascular and metabolic risk is variable. A Cochrane Review in 2019 concluded there was low to moderate evidence of a modest benefit but noted that there were still ongoing trials. Since 2019, there have been a number of published trials that have not shown a benefit of the Med Diet over other interventions or usual care. It is possible that dietary factors such as quality or quantity of carbohydrate and energy restriction are more important factors, along with the degree of weight loss, than the Med Diet itself. There are also many other factors that influence the uptake and effectiveness of the Med Diet in populations that have a different traditional or habitual diet. This review paper examines a selection of 20 Med Diet intervention trials specifically looking at clinical outcomes of glucose metabolism: fasting plasma glucose, HbA1c, development of type 2 diabetes or need for hypoglycaemic medications, with or without other cardiometabolic risk factors. These trials are a mix of randomised controlled trials, crossover studies and cohort studies of greater than 8 weeks duration with more than 25 participants. There is heterogeneity in study designs and outcomes, making comparison difficult, but there is no clear benefit of the Med Diet presented.

This review highlights the importance of dietary fibres (DF) intake and its interconnection with the gut microbiome and psychological well-being, while also exploring the effects of existing DF interventions on these aspects in adults. The gut microbiota is a complex and diverse ecosystem in which microbial species interact, influencing the human host. DF are heterogeneous, requiring different microbial species to degrade the complex DF structures. Emerging evidence suggests that microbial fermentation of DF produces short-chain fatty acids (SCFA), which may play a role in regulating psychological well-being by affecting neurotransmitter levels, including serotonin. The effectiveness of DF interventions depends on factors such as baseline gut microbiota composition, the dosage and the source of DF consumed. Although the gut microbiota of adults is relatively stable, studies have shown that the abundance of the species in the gut microbiota can change within 24 h of an intervention and may return to baseline following the termination of DF intervention. This review underscores the need for larger and well-powered dietary clinical trials incorporating longitudinal biological sample collections, advanced sequencing and omic techniques (including novel dietary biomarkers and microbial metabolites), validated subjective questionnaires and dietary records. Furthermore, mechanistic studies driven by clinical observations are crucial to understanding gut microbiota function and its underlying biological pathways, informing targeted dietary interventions.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the fastest-growing neurological condition in the world, affecting 11·8 million people worldwide in 2021. Due to the globally expanding and ageing population, as well as growing industrialisation, this number is likely to increase. Given the absence of disease-modifying pharmacological therapies, this review aimed to examine the effect of dietary interventions on PD progression, motor symptoms, non-motor symptoms, specifically those affecting the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, and severity. To do so, this review synthesised the current evidence from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on dietary patterns, individual foods and beverages, and nutritional supplements including nutrients, bioactive compounds, and biotics.

Results from the included RCTs failed to demonstrate conclusive evidence for the use of a dietary intervention as a therapy for improving PD progression, symptoms and severity. However, this is likely a reflection of the current scarcity of RCTs in the literature, rather than an outright demonstration of the ineffectiveness of such dietary approaches. In contrast, several trials have demonstrated a beneficial effect of biotic supplementation in managing GI symptoms, particularly constipation syndrome, which may be a promising avenue for improving GI-related issues that affect up to 80 % of PD patients. In conclusion, further RCTs are required to decipher the role that diet may play in mitigating PD progression and severity and improving overall patient care by reducing both motor and non-motor symptoms.

My research on dietary protein and the regulation of proteostasis in muscle and the whole body during growth and adult maintenance is reviewed. Growth control involves both permissive and regulatory roles of protein acting with genetic determinants and functional demand, to mediate substrate flow into metabolic consumption, energy storage and growth. In 1995 a Protein-Stat hierarchical model for control of the fat-free mass was proposed and is updated here with special emphasis on the skeletal muscle mass. Control is exerted in large part through a central aminostatic appetite mechanism sensing changes in free amino-acid patterns in response to the balance between their supply in relation to their demand. This acts primarily to maintain skeletal muscle mass at a level set by the linear dimensions of the organism, which in turn is controlled by genetic programming and mediated by the developmental hormones acting together with an appropriate anabolic drive deriving from dietary protein. This, together with other important nutrients like zinc, calcium and vitamin D, provides the regulatory stimulus for growth and protein deposition in all tissues. The applicability of this model to childhood growth and development will be described as well as the maintenance of the adult phenotypic muscle mass within populations with protein intakes varying over a wide range, work which resulted in an adaptive metabolic demand model for protein and amino acid requirements and values for apparent adult protein and lysine requirements. Finally current understanding of aminostatic mechanisms of amino-acid sensing in the brain will be reviewed.