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Center for Studies of Sensory Impairment, Aging and Metabolism Guatemala City Guatemala
Dear Sir:
The 17th Ross Research Conference on Medical Issues, "Physiologically Active Food Components: Their Role in Optimizing Health and Aging," was a supplement to the June issue of the Journal (1) and thus was provided to all subscribers. Such a venue should make it fair game for an evaluative critique from the readership.
As a scientist beginning to work my way out of the exclusive paradigm of undernutrition toward the coming epidemic of chronic disease in the low-income countries of Central America, I found the words of the conference chair in his summary provocative: "Current perceptions of functional foods and components held by scientists and consumers in different parts of the world were presented and discussed." Were they? I searched through the supplement to revisit the basis for this claim of a global outreach for this rather exclusive gathering.
With a world defined in terms of diversity of its people, only 36% of the conference participants were women. On the basis of birth origin, only 0.9% of the participants present were born in developing countries. Edmonton, Canada, and Brussels, Belgium, vied for the most northerly latitude of representation in the conference, whereas the southern limit was defined by Tucson, AZ, and San Antonio, TX. The percentage of the world's population represented by the combined populations of Belgium, Germany, Canada, and the United States, the nations represented by the participants, is <7%. So, the chair's claim edged into hyperbole.
Several hypotheses about this lack of geographic representation occurred to me. Is San Diego really that much further from Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro, or Mexico City than it is from Brussels or Stuttgart? Perhaps there is no interest in or experience with functional foods outside of the Western world, although the International Life Sciences Institute sponsored and published results from a functional food seminar held in Southeast Asia (2). Perhaps there is not the same degree of research expertise and contribution from developing and tropical countries that there is from the northern temperate zone. If this is the explanation, it constitutes a serious wake-up call for those of us working in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to invest research resources to earn our place on the platform of upcoming meetings on this growing topic. We represent, after all, the majority of the world's potential consumers of functional foods. The topic (and such products) impinges on our health, given that commercial globalization has already brought outlets for so-called physiologically active food components to Guatemala and many other countries of Latin America. So even if researchers into this topic are yet to be found in the academic institutions of developing countries, at least the roster of the discussants could have gone beyond Arizona, Texas, and 3 sites within the Washington, DC, Beltway.
A few other observations are worthy of mention. Despite its title, relatively little evidence or experience was shared on aging save for the associations of vitamin E and immune function (3) and some passing references to Alzheimer disease (4). When reading the supplement, one should focus on the words of John Fernstrom, eg, "I am concerned at this moment more about safety than efficacy," because he alone cried out to orient the priorities to the logical axis in any paradigm for interventions for human health amid a wilderness of enthusiastic advocates.
The lessons I derived from receiving my Ross Research Conference proceedings as an AJCN supplement were profound but not all of them were of an academic nature.
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