Micronutrients in the semantic landscape: perspectives from a nutrition grad student
Food and nutrition are an integral part of health and encompass one of the largest categories of adaptable environmental exposures experienced by humans. While people may speak often about weight management, trendy diets, or macro counting, nutrition also encompasses biochemical mechanisms and impacts both phenotypes and disease. As a dietitian and nutrition researcher, I’ll admit that there are parts of nutrition that even I overlook or take for granted in my everyday life.
Recently, I’ve been spending time getting reacquainted with some of the most important components of the human diet, micronutrients. Within the category of micronutrients are vitamins and minerals, essential components for human health and controllers of thousands of biochemical functions within your body on a daily basis. From playing a role in energy metabolism, to maintaining electrolyte balance that keeps your heart and other muscles functioning, micronutrients are crucial to daily life function, and deficiencies or excesses can severely impact health temporarily or permanently.
You have probably heard about extreme deficiency scenarios such as scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency that leads to bleeding gums and loose teeth, or iron deficiency anemia, which can cause shortness of breath and fatigue. Likely you have also heard about eating food rich in micronutrients to prevent deficiency, or have even heard of supplementation in some instances. So if it seems as though micronutrients are so simple and straightforward, then why am I still talking about them?
Micronutrients and dietary exposures throughout life have a strong role in the prevention or progression of disease, even when they are not “clinically significant” deficiencies or toxicities. This does not only include disease caused directly by a change in nutrition intake, but disease from a potentially unrelated etiology that is amplified by the nutrition status of an individual. This could be attributed to the microbiome, specific nutrient provisions, a chemical that interacted with the food prior to consumption, or something still unknown to researchers and clinicians.
Looking at the direct impacts of micronutrient consumption on human health, or even considering how a disease state can be extrapolated by the irregularity of a nutrient, can allow for a deeper understanding of phenotypes. For example, individuals with kidney failure may experience decreased clearance of excess metabolites and micronutrients from their system due to their limited renal capacity. Because of this disease state, an individual can acquire additional problematic phenotypes, such as increased blood potassium (hyperkalemia), and their subsequent biological impacts. As seen within this example, phenotypes and disease states are not often happening singularly, co-morbidities are commonplace. Recognizing that nutrition is a contributor to biological functions is part of understanding human disease, including the realization that two individuals with the same disease state can have varying needs for treatment based on their nutrition status.
Micronutrients, and nutrition in general, are constant exposures to individuals across the globe. And, while nutrition is not the only factor impacting human health, it certainly is a key player. Finding ways to record and evaluate nutrition as a factor of biological research and phenotyping will deepen the conversation beyond just micronutrient deficiencies like scurvy, but support the intricate interlacing of nutrition as a factor in human disease diagnostics, discovery, and treatment.
As the Monarch Initiative (monarchinitiative.org) continues to define connections between diseases, phenotypes, and genotypes, and integrates data from across all organisms, integration of nutrition information is a natural next step to deepening our understanding of health. The inclusion of nutrition interventions in the developing Medical Actions Ontology (MAxO) and plans to elucidate micronutrient influence on existing phenotypes and diseases within Mondo and HPO ontologies are just the beginning.
Lauren Chan MS, RD, LDN
