National nutrition plan opens a new era of national health

In a healthy China, nutrition comes first, and nutrition is the material basis of national quality. With the continuous improvement of people’s living standards in China, the nutrition supply capacity has been significantly enhanced, and the national nutrition and health status has been significantly improved. However, it still faces the problems of frequent nutrition-related diseases and the lack of popularization of a nutritious and healthy lifestyle, which has become an important factor affecting national health. In the past two years, many programmatic documents, including "Healthy China 2030" and "National Nutrition Plan", have made demands on improving national nutrition and quality, and believe that a new era of national health will surely come.

The problem of national undernutrition and excess coexist.

In recent years, the dietary and nutritional status of urban and rural residents in China has changed greatly. Previously, the Report on Nutrition and Chronic Diseases of China Residents released by the National Health Planning Commission analyzed and evaluated the changes of nutrition and chronic diseases of Chinese residents in the past 10 years. The report shows that after years of efforts, the nutritional status of Chinese residents has improved significantly, which is manifested in the following aspects: the physical and nutritional development of residents has improved, the height and weight of residents have increased, and the growth retardation and malnutrition have improved significantly; But at the same time, with the increase of residents’ intake of fat and high-quality protein, the problem of overweight and obesity is becoming more and more serious, which has also become the main cause of hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases in adults.

At the same time, "Healthy China 2030" also pointed out that the overall situation of national nutrition in China at present is that some residents lack micronutrients, some people consume too much high-calorie foods such as oil, and the problems of insufficient nutrition and excess nutrition coexist.

Nutrition science popularization will be more standardized and normalized.

With the continuous development of mobile internet technology, nutrition science popularization has become the norm in citizens’ daily life. When people turn on their mobile phones, they can often see the sharing and pushing of nutrition and health. While spreading nutrition knowledge to the citizens, there are also some false information that has a great misleading effect on the citizens.

In July this year, the State Council issued the National Nutrition Plan (2017-2030), which deployed seven implementation strategies to ensure the work, of which the seventh clearly stated that it is necessary to popularize nutrition and health knowledge and promote the normalization of nutrition and health science education activities.

Liu Ping, deputy director of the National Food Safety Risk Assessment Center, once said in an interview with the media that the popularization of science in nutrition and food safety has been done for many years, such as the annual National Nutrition Week, Food Safety Week, Nutrition and Health Lecture Hall, etc., which has made positive contributions to promoting the dissemination of science, nutrition and health knowledge. At the same time, however, the traditional one-way information dissemination and propaganda mode is still the main mode of nutrition science popularization in China. The information supply is insufficient, and the content and form are relatively simple, which is not enough to meet the nutritional and health needs of the public. It also provides an opportunity for some nutrition pseudo-experts, and some so-called "masters" appear to confuse the audience.

In order to solve these problems, the Plan proposes to innovate the expression forms of popular science information on nutrition, establish a free and shared national popular science platform on nutrition food safety, and adopt various communication modes and channels to provide popular science information to different groups in a targeted and accurate manner. At the same time, it will also strengthen the construction of popular science teams for nutritious food safety, discover and correct pseudo-scientific nutritional information in time, and truly convey scientific and healthy nutritional knowledge to the public.

Grain nutrition has been mentioned in a more prominent position.

Cereals are an important source of human energy, which can avoid the disadvantages of high energy and high fat, and play an important role in promoting human health. In recent years, with the change of lifestyle, the problem of uneven diet among China residents has become increasingly prominent. According to the survey on the Intake of Coarse Grains among Adult Residents in China, which was participated by China Nutrition Association, more than 80% of adult residents in China have insufficient intake of whole grains, and the proportion of grains in the nutritious foods concerned is also small.

In order to adjust residents’ diet structure and balance their diet, in the new version of Dietary Guidelines for China Residents released in 2016, "Variety of food and cereal as the main recommendation" was put forward as the first item, and people were strongly encouraged to change their diet structure and increase their cereal intake. At the same time, the National Nutrition Week held from May 14 to May 20, 2017 took "whole grain, nutrition+"as the theme, and during the nutrition week, a series of activities were launched to help residents choose nutritious and high-quality grains.

At present, all kinds of cereal products have appeared in the market and gradually become a part of citizens’ lives. In the future, grain will certainly play a more important role in the daily life of citizens.

Special medical food will become an effective supplement to national nutrition.

In national nutrition, there is a very important part-the nutrition problem of patients. However, this issue has not been paid enough attention. The National Nutrition Plan puts forward six major actions, one of which is the clinical nutrition action, aiming at strengthening the nutritional diagnosis and treatment of patients and improving their nutritional status.

Professor Shi Hanping, Chairman of the Application Committee of Formulated Foods for Special Medical Use of China Nutrition and Health Food Association, said at the first Guangdong Symposium on Formulated Foods for Special Medical Use in 2017 that nutritional therapy is another treatment method that pays equal attention to surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and other treatments. It should be the basic treatment method or first-line treatment method for patients, and it is a real integrated treatment. However, among the 140 million inpatients in China, less than 1% have received clinical nutrition diagnosis and treatment, while hundreds of millions of patients with chronic non-communicable diseases outside the hospital are still in an unattended state. The incidence rate of malnutrition in major diseases such as cancer patients is 70%-80%, and the needs of tens of millions of patients are not met.

Professor Shi Hanping’s clinical nutrition therapy refers to special medical food, that is, formula food for special medical use, which is specially processed and prepared to meet the special needs of people with limited eating, digestive and absorption disorders, metabolic disorders or specific disease States for nutrients or meals. Generally speaking, special medical food is food for patients, which has a direct promoting effect on patients’ recovery.

China’s special medical food started late, but the state attaches great importance to its development. In recent two years, the relevant policies and systems of special medical food have been intensively introduced, and the industry norms have been continuously improved. In March 2016, the State Food and Drug Administration issued the Measures for the Administration of the Registration of Formulated Foods for Special Medical Uses; In November 2016, the State Food and Drug Administration issued the "Quality Management Standards for Clinical Trials of Formulated Foods for Special Medical Use (Trial)". In September 2017, the State Food and Drug Administration issued an announcement on the items and requirements of application materials for the registration of formula food for special medical use (Trial) and the research requirements for the stability of formula food for special medical use (Trial).

The introduction of this series of measures not only has positive promotion significance for the development of special medical food industry, but also effectively supplements the shortcomings of national nutrition in the past. More importantly, it has played the most direct and effective help for the majority of patients. (Reporter Zhu Fenglan/Wen)