Nutritional Assessment in Preventing and Managing Obesity

Dear Colleagues,

Termed a global epidemic, obesity and its associated health conditions are a major concern worldwide, and the problem currently shows no remarkable signs of abating. As such, the obesity prevention and treatment strategies used to date need to be challenged.

Nutritional assessment, defined as ‘the interpretation of information from dietary, laboratory, anthropometric and clinical studies’ (Gibson, 2005), is a core component of any lifestyle intervention including approaches that aim at reducing the level of obesity in the population. Further, as advances in personalised nutrition continue to emerge, more individualised approaches in nutritional assessment may disentangle obesity aetiology, and could in turn inform what needs to be done to reverse that trend.

For example, meta-analyses in children/adolescents and adults have confirmed that, on an absolute basis and when mostly traditional dietary assessment methods are utilised, greater underreporting is identified in those with obesity; this edges unfavourably for individuals that diet must be measured more accurately. From a public health perspective, the emerging picture of the ageing population is difficult to reconcile with the long-evidenced limitations of body mass index as a measure of adiposity. Likewise, reliable nutritional risk screening tools sensitive to identify sarcopenic obesity remain elusive. In non-clinical settings, although prior genome-wide association studies propose that genetics alone can only partly explain individual variability in diet and lifestyle behaviours, epigenetics including interactions among nutritional status indices and eating behaviour traits and/or food preferences may provide an impetus for a new scope in obtaining and interpreting personal and familial medical and dieting/weight history. Regarding laboratory data, the key role of both established nutritional biomarkers and the emerging metabolomics may allow additional opportunities in obesity assessment. Finally, in a more holistic view, the field warrants systematic efforts towards the development of tools and frameworks that could address the evidence that has recently put nutritional epidemiology in the spotlight.

We therefore welcome studies that use, evaluate, or critically discuss traditional and/or novel nutritional assessment methodologies in relation to obesity prevention and treatment. We hope that this Special Issue will share valuable knowledge and encourage discussions on nutritional assessment, including but not limited to papers on methodologies that facilitate a timely and scientifically substantiated assessment of nutritional status, as well as papers on anthropometric, laboratory, clinical, and/or dietary nutritional assessment methods that are tailored to the obese child and adult population.

Dr. Christina Mavrogianni
Dr. Vasiliki Iatridi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Nutrients is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• obesity
• overweight
• nutrition assessment
• nutritional epidemiology
• new technologies in dietary assessment
• personalised nutrition
• nutrigenetics
• nutritional risk screening tool
• eating behaviour
• anthropometry
• nutritional biomarkers