The trans version, which simply has the double bond on the other side of the molecule, is flat and has adverse health effects. An example striking in its simplicity is oleic acid, 18 : 1 n-9, which has a bent configuration and is thought to be beneficial for health ( 3 ). It is accentuated by the observation that tiny changes in a molecule can have huge physiological effects. Each food consists of many thousands of molecules, as is apparent from the many peaks seen in biochemical analysis of food with procedures such as MS. It consists of cells, other non-cellular material and their molecular constituents. There is evidence in favour of these assumptions, as previously discussed ( Reference Jacobs, Gross and Tapsell 2 ).įood is biologically complex. Viability of the food synergy idea implies that there is balance in the biochemical constituents of the organism being eaten, that pieces of this orchestration survive digestion and that coordinated constituents mutually affect human biology. The fact that foods are eaten in patterns has also arisen over millennia, perhaps partly under evolutionary control. The composite nature of food, serving the life of the organism being eaten as well as the life of the eater, is central to the food synergy concept. Food consists of non-random complex mixtures of compounds, developed under evolutionary control. There are several reasons to believe that food synergy is fundamentally a good model. Thus the term ‘more than additive’ refers to mathematical synergy, while the term ‘additive’ refers to a ‘complicated system acting in concert’.

‘Food synergy’ implies that the food constituents act in concert on health that is, in maintaining a healthy body by promoting homoeostasis. Even if there is not any mathematical synergy, the many constituents of individual foods and dietary patterns are composed in complex ways that would be hard to synthesise in a laboratory. The term ‘synergy’ used regarding food is meant to imply the benefits of looking at whole foods and diet patterns. The concept of food synergy leads to new thinking in nutrition science and can help to forge rational nutrition policy-making and to determine future nutrition research strategies. Food is much more complex than drugs, but essentially uninvestigated as food or pattern. A consistent and robust conclusion is that certain types of beneficial diet patterns, notably described with words such as ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘prudent’, or adverse patterns, often described by the word ‘Western’, predict chronic disease. Unlike many dietary phenomena in nutritional epidemiology, diet pattern appears to be highly correlated over time within person. This observation is the basis for the argument that nutrition research should focus more strongly on foods and on dietary patterns. It appears that the focus on nutrients rather than foods is in many ways counterproductive. Therefore, although nutrient deficiency is a known phenomenon, serious for the sufferer, and curable by taking the isolated nutrient, the effect of isolated nutrients or other chemicals derived from food on chronic disease, when that chemical is not deficient, may not have the same beneficial effect.

Isolated nutrients have been extensively studied in well-designed, long-term, large randomised clinical trials, typically with null and sometimes with harmful effects. Food synergy is the concept that the non-random mixture of food constituents operates in concert for the life of the organism eaten and presumably for the life of the eater.

Synergy of serra