Nestlé Nutrition Institute Workshop

Discover more about the future of nutrition science in today’s ever changing world.

From early nutrition and lifelong health, to the role of the food ladder and the gut microbiome in infancy, to the technological advances shaping clinical practice, our global experts will walk us through the various developments in childhood nutrition.

The past three years was an unprecedented time as sudden health challenges led to a shift in dietary patterns, lifestyle and nutrition status of families all across the globe..

Now that the world is slowly opening up once more, we must plan for a better tomorrow and build a healthier future with the science of nutrition..

In Nestlé Nutrition Institute’s 98th Workshop in collaboration with the International Academy of Nutrition Educators and the NNEdPro Global Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health, we will explore the latest evidence-based research on metabolic health, nutrient supplementation, and how we can better care for the future of healthcare..

What we feed our children today will determine their growth, lifestyle, preferences, health outcomes at a later age. It is therefore imperative that children are given the opportunity of best nutrition possible from conception till growing up years. Hence the field of pediatric nutrition has grown extensively over the decades in terms of discoveries, research and trends. It is interesting how the focus of nutrition science has moved from nourishing the child as an individual, to the child as part of the community and now to the child and the environment.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 15 million babies are born too early every year. That is more than 1 in 10 babies and this number is rising.

Early and adequate nutritional support is critical to achieve appropriate rates of weight gain, which are almost twice that of a term infant. Despite intensive nutritional strategies for premature infants, growth failure remains a major problem.

The 96th Nestle Nutrition Institute workshop, which took place from 26th till 28th of May 2021, focussed on the latest scientific knowledge in the area of neonatal care in preterm and LBW infants, including human milk oligosaccharides and its potential impact on the health of the neonate.

Throughout the three-day workshop, leading international experts shared the scientific perspectives on how optimal early nutrition can impact a short and long-term health outcome in preterm infants.

According to the World Health Organisation the early child period, which includes the age up to 5 years, is considered to be the most important developmental phase throughout the lifespan.

This period of a child’s life is fundamental in building the foundation for the physical growth, development, health, social and emotional skills.

The 95^th Nestle Nutrition Institute Workshop, “Building future health and well-being in thriving toddlers and young children”, explored in some details current scientific research, challenges and opportunities in cementing a healthy foundation for life in toddlers and young children. The first session focused on the overview of the nutritional challenges in toddlers and young children across the globe, such an overweight and obesity, which can be very detrimental during an important period of toddler’s development and growth. The theme of the second session revealed the journey from infancy to toddlerhood and role of nutrition in it.  The large focus of the scientific debates also was given to the social aspect, responsive, responsible and nurturing care-giving. The third session of the workshop on the health behavior and developing brain was built to explain the steps of the moto skills development and role of physical activities and nutrition in influencing cognitive development and learning abilities of a child.

Considerable advances have been made in science in order to understand the varied mixture of bioactive components in human milk. The 94th Nestlé Nutrition Institute Workshop was designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the latest findings in human milk research and its potential to modulate mucosal immunity, the microbiome, and its impact on the neonate.

The 94th Nestlé Nutrition Institute workshop is dedicated to Prof. Lars A. Hanson, who was the first investigator to identify SIgA in the colostrum and milk. He has been one of the most devoted scholars to the study of mammalian lactation and breastfeeding, and has also been instrumental in a global effort to foster breastfeeding in the developing world and for undernourished infants. He is rightfully considered as the “father of modern breastfeeding.”

The aim of the 93rd Nestlé Nutrition Institute Workshop is to map the challenges within the global landscape of childhood nutrition. The opening session outlined the key barriers faced in pediatric nutrition, from both the global and local perspectives. Understanding the specific nutrition deficits of a particular population is a first step in addressing the problem. In addition, we must also understand local feeding practices, in order to identify suitable interventions that can strike a balance between effectiveness and safety. The second session focused on the role of milk in early childhood. Despite of undisputable critical importance of breastfeeding, we still need to learn more of its composition and biological function The biggest challenges comes after the exclusive breastfeeding period when nutrition choice depends not only on the level of caregivers knowledge on appropriate for child age nutrition but also on the socio-economical, cultural and environmental factors. The final session took a step broader in order to identify the environmental influences of nutrition. Infection from unhygienic surroundings combined with inter-generational nutritional deficits are major forces that can shape the epigenome and the infant gut microbiome. Together, these aspects of the global landscape of nutrition provide a roadmap towards combating nutritional deficiencies in vulnerable children around the world.

Nutrition education is the centerpiece of the 92nd Nestlé Nutrition Institute Workshop. Nutrition education may be defined as a combination of educational tactics accompanied by physical or environmental supports, whose purpose is to encourage the voluntary adoption of foods and other lifestyle behaviors that are beneficial for health. The first session took an in-depth look at what nutrition education really is and how it can be used to influence different target populations, including women, girls and young children. The second session explored the complexities of eating behavior, underscoring the importance of early childhood as a critical time for intervention. Here, nutrition education efforts in childcare, schools, and community settings play an important role. The final session shifted the focus to nutrition education in medical schools. Paradoxically, nutrition education is sorely lacking in many medical schools around the world. This session highlighted the latest educational technologies that are being used in medical school curricula, as well as methods for bringing nutrition to the clinic. Altogether, the three sessions in the workshop cover the basis of how nutrition interventions can be designed and delivered to improve food choices and ultimately, an individual’s health. 

Insights you will gain from this workshop:

• Uncover the role of nutrition education in improving the quality of life in individuals,  families, including education of parents and caregivers, children in day care and schools
• Recognize the importance of nutrition education for healthcare professionals
• Understand the critical impact of nutrition education in the public health sector

Infant and childhood nutrition form the basis of an individual’s health in later life. Multiple lines of evidence – from experimental to epidemiological – are converging to highlight the importance of this early period for metabolic programming, physiological growth and cognition. This is the cornerstone of the ‘developmental origin of health and disease’ (DOHAD) paradigm, underscoring the significance of infancy and early childhood for setting the foundation for health. Any public health intervention that seeks to improve the general health of a population or combat disease should therefore target infants and children in order to reap the greatest benefits.

This workshop will enable you to:    

• Explore early eating behaviour and taste development
• Understand what children eat
• Revisit the importance of breakfast for children's health and development

Human milk presents the optimal nutrition for infants and is key to sustaining health and building the foundation for growth and cognitive development.

Rapidly-advancing technology has allowed us a closer look at the different components of human milk and shed light on their biological effects on growth, metabolism, cognition, and immunity. Yet researchers face many challenges in their quest to unravel its complexities. An understanding of human milk is inextricably linked to an understanding of the biology of the growing infant

The 90th Nestlé Nutrition Institute Workshop brought together the world’s experts on human milk, to discuss the full spectrum of our knowledge of human milk, from the history and mechanics of breastfeeding, its physiological effects, to the new surprises revealed by metabolomics and comparative biology.

It is now well understood around the world that good nutrition plays a major role in the health of individuals, at all stages of development and life.

In recent years, detailed clinical research into the effects of nutrition on growth has brought a wealth of new data that is giving fresh understanding to this key area of development particularly in the first 1,000 days of life: appropriate nutrition at this time can program and prepare the body for long-term health status. Poor nutrition can contribute to obesity or stunting and can also have an adverse effect on brain development and cognition.

Exposure to microbes in utero impacts fetal development. Appropriate colonization is associated with healthy immune defense mechanisms whereas inappropriate colonization can result in immune-related disease in later life. An important environmental factor influencing the nature of colonization is diet. Oligosaccharides contained in human breast milk have been found to effect intestinal microbiota. In this Nestlé Workshop, the importance of microbiota in the setting of both health and disease has been addressed. 

The first 1,000 days, the time period from conception until a child's second birthday, is the time in which the infant is the most vulnerable and which lays the foundation to its future health. During this transitional period, infants also progress from exclusively milk-based liquid diet to the family diet and self-feeding. Thus, the CF period is not just an important time to satisfy an infant’s nutrition, but also a time to form healthy food preferences and feeding practices and to further stimulate the infant’s ongoing, healthy development.

The quality and quantity of proteins introduced to infants can have a major impact on long-term health. The 86th Nestlé Nutrition Institute Workshop was held in Beijing, china between 24 and 27 May 2015. The workshop gathered key stakeholders from across the globe to discuss and evaluate current evidence and emerging data on protein in neonatal and infant nutrition. 

Around conception, during fetal life and in infancy and childhood, nutritional and other environmental variations impact normal development with lasting effects on later health and chronic disease risk. At a time when the collective of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) is increasingly seen as a public health emergency ‘in slow motion’, the importance of the early life period in healthy development cannot be overstated. Rapid environmental changes are clearly having a detrimental impact, and have seen a sharp rise in allergy and childhood obesity. Nutritional changes are strongly implicated in these and other inflammatory diseases. Although NCDs are seen as diseases of affluence and economic development,the burden is greatest in underprivileged populations. Acute early effects and the resulting maladaptive physiological responses that drive latent long-term effects are responsible for a vicious cycle of epigenetic programming, which has seen childhood obesity driven by maternal obesity.

Biomarkers are the backbones of our daily medical decision making. They indicate the malfunction of organ systems and efficacy of therapeutic interventions. However, only in a few areas related to human nutrition and metabolism, biomarkers play important roles to predict health and functional outcome, and are routinely used in clinical practice. Parameters indicating the lipid status/metabolism which predict long-term cardiovascular risk and efficacy of targeted interventions have been included in routine patient management for a longtime. Biomarkers of lipid status have also shown the limitations of our present nutritional intervention strategies. Iron deficiency and overload can be precisely diagnosed and managed by biomarkers, and it has recently been shown that the best ‘biomarker’ to guide treatment may be the physiological ‘determinant’of iron utilization (hepcidin). Interestingly, out of the ‘big four’ global nutritional deficiencies (vitamin A, zinc, iodine, and iron) which are associated with significant morbidity and mortality in humans, three still cannot be precisely diagnosed by employing (biochemical) biomarkers. Therefore, intervention strategies are mostly still targeted at population level and biomarkers play a limited role in research and decision making. Satisfactory pediatric nutritional biomarkers of outcome must be predictive of later functional health and ideally remain stable over the period from infancy to childhood and adult life. Current traditional biomarkers such as anthropometry and blood pressure are indices that best fulfill those criteria. They are important to monitor long-term health of children who were born with low birth weight in terms of malnutrition or obesity. Our epigenome and metabolome can be influenced by dietary, lifestyle, and environmental factors, which contribute to the heterogeneity observed in humans. Therefore, the risk factors determined for populations cannot be applied to the individual, one has Foreword XI to accept ‘individual variability’. New biomarkers which indicate the individual risk or benefit must not neglect the complexity of foods, lifestyle, and metabolic processes that contribute to health or disease and are significant challenges for personalizing dietary advice for healthy or diseased individuals. The 84th Nestlé Nutrition Institute (NNI) Workshop focused on values and limitations of traditional nutritional biomarkers and opportunities of new biomarkers. NNI would like to thank the three Chairmen, Prof. Emmanuel E.Baetge (Switzerland), Prof. Anil Dhawan (UK), and Prof. Andrew Prentice,(UK) for their challenging and interesting program together and all speakers for their significant contributions. We would also thank the Nestlé Health Science Institute and the Nestlé Research Centre for cooperation and support.

The 83rd Nestle Nutrition Institute workshop was themed, ‘Frailty: Pathophysiology, Phenotype and Patient Care.’ At this event, experts from around the world met to share cutting edge research in the quest to better understand and increase awareness of the expanding geriatric syndrome of frailty.

The last decades have illuminated the important role of nutrition in the prevention and management of diseases. Despite the elaborated knowledge and discussions on the scientific podium, the role of nutrition is often overlooked in clinical practice. Unfortunately, medical nutrition is in most cases not incorporated in the curriculum at medical schools, which might lead to negative attitudes or even total neglect of the nutritional needs of hospitalized patients.

Every year, more than 30 million babies are born with low birth weight (LBW; <2500g), which makes them more vulnerable to short- and long-term adverse outcomes. The 81st Nestlé Nutrition Institute Workshop brought together world class scientists in the area of neonatal care, epidemiology and nutrition management of low birth weight infants. Throughout the three-day workshop, participants heard from leading experts on the latest scientific evidence on catch up and growth acceleration, the short and long term consequences of Low Birth Weight Babies and the importance of different nutrition approaches in the management of LBWB.