Welcome to the Interactive Programme of MNF 2023

Over the last years, food systems have been shocked by multiple crises. Climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine are affecting access to, and prices of, food globally. Inequities within food systems restrict access to healthy diets exacerbating inequalities in diet, nutrition and health. As a result, food insecurity and young children with wasting have risen, foodborne diseases and the risk of zoonotic diseases are increasing, and unhealthy diets and malnutrition are among the main causes of disease and death.Mitigation, adaptation, and resilience are mechanisms that people, animals and the planet use to overcome the challenges posed by crises. However, these systems are managed and addressed individually, without recognizing their interconnections. More and more, it is becoming clear that integrated multisystemic responses across sectors are needed to address the root causes of malnutrition in all its forms. The One Health approach is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, plants, animals and ecosystems. It recognizes that the health of all are closely linked and inter-dependent. This session critically examines how the One Health approach can be implemented to improve micronutrient nutrition resilience.

This session will present the latest evidence, challenges faced, and informed guidance on the measurement of hemoglobin concentration in populations. The session will cover areas related to new hemoglobin thresholds and their implications for health, interpretation of hemoglobin data in surveys, and best practices in laboratory- and population-based measurement of hemoglobin.

This session will provide updates on the Micronutrient Forum’s DInA Project and Micronutrient Data Generation Initiative, describe new tools available to support MN status surveys, and review ongoing efforts to establish regional resource laboratories and enhance laboratory capacity.

This session will: 1) review the critical importance of data on population MN status for policy formulation and program design and evaluation, 2) discuss the central role of MN status biomarkers for assessing population status and the biological basis for these biomarkers and related deficiency cutoffs, and 3) summarize currently available information on the prevalence of selected MN deficiencies and factors affecting these estimates.

This session will provide recent examples of different approaches being used to identify novel biomarkers of micronutrient status and to select appropriate clinically- or physiologically-based biomarker cutoffs to define nutrient deficiency and excess.  

The complexity and cost of blood specimen collection and analysis remain barriers to generating micronutrient biomarker data. This session will review recent innovations in the collection, processing and laboratory analysis of clinical specimens for micronutrient status assessment.

Bioavailability remains a crucial aspect in the delivery of micronutrients from foods to the human body. In this session, we will explore new insights into the regulation of micronutrient absorption, and review several new methods to assess nutrient bioavailability in humans.

Focusing on food and crops, this session will explore recent advances in technologies related to the delivery and measurement of micronutrients in fortified, biofortified, and conventional foods and crops. Fortified and biofortified food technologies will include novel vehicles (e.g. buillion cubes, milk, chickpeas) and fortificants (e.g. chelates, nanoparticles). The session will will also explore recent advances in agronomic biofortification and genome editing augmenting nutrient density in food crops. Micronutrient measurement tools and methods, including crop sampling and market testing of commercial foods, will be explored.

Much of our understanding for the role of micronutrients in neurocognitive development is driven by mechanistic studies using animal models. Further, equivoval results come from human intervention trials largely because of the hetergeneity in study design and assessment methods. Recent advances have seen an increase in more objective and standardizec tools to measure neurodevelopment in population-based reserach. In this panel-led session, these advances will be discussed using relevant and recent data from micronutrient intervention studies.

Increasing the density of minerals and vitamins in food staples offers a means to increase mineral and vitamin intakes at no extra cost to poor consumers. Transgenic plant development and agronomic approaches are discussed. Maintaining high productivity/yields and farmer profits is a key element to these approaches.

Accelerated climate change shocks impact the capacity of food systems worldwide to nourish populations, with a disproportionate impact on the nutrition resilience of the most vulnerable populations, specifically women and children. While this poses challenges for yields and nutrient density of crops, leading to higher food price and reduced micronutrient status, there are also opportunities for transformative adaptations of food systems for a positive impact on environment, health and micronutrition. Which transformations are ready to be scaled-up, what lessons can the global North learn from the global South, and what are the actions for which we shall hold governments, farmers, food industry, academics and consumers accountable?

Micronutrients influence and support every stage of the immune response. Several micronutrients have immunomodulating functions and thus influence the susceptibility of a host to infectious diseases and the course and outcome of such diseases. Certain of these micronutrients also possess antioxidant functions that not only regulate immune homeostasis of the host, but also alter the genome of the microbes. These micronutrient infection and immune function interactions and their clinical and public health relevance in developing countries are explored in this session.