Les temps modernes de la saga alimentaire : le rêve est-il toujours vivant ?

During the early decades of the 20th century, the general population was still facing vitamin deficiencies that remained one of the main concerns for nutritionists up to the end of World War II. After 1945, the populations, at least in Western countries, were submitted to new nutritional challenges. The first one was the emerging problem of overnutrition with its two main consequences, the increasing frequency of excess in body weight and the concomitant increasing incidence of cardiovascular diseases. As early as the fifties (1950-1960), the Cretan Mediterranean diet was proposed as a new approach for combating the burden of overnutrition and cardiovascular diseases. A few years later, several Experts' Committees suggested nutritional recommendations that were based on the data provided by epidemiological surveys and interventional trials. However, most recommendations remain too stringent and purely theoretical. As a consequence, these guidelines are poorly and rarely applicable in real life. The food industry has developed and marketed new alimentary additives such as sweeteners, or new alimentary products such as functional, fortified and light foods or beverages. In addition, during the last past years, the people living in the so-called developed countries were stricken by new fears that resulted from either the development of genetically modified organisms or the onset of new diseases such as the spongiform bovine encephalopathy. The nutritional debate is permanently reactivated by divergent opinions between scientists, industrialists, politicians and ecologists. However the dream is still alive and we are still in the search for the next nutritional revolution, the nutrigenetic, that would consist to personalize our feeding according to our genetic mapping.