Nutritional biology: a neglected basic discipline of nutritional science

On the basis of a scientific-philosophical analysis, this paper tries to show that the approaches in current nutritional science—including its subdisciplines which focus on molecular aspects—are predominantly application-oriented. This becomes particularly evident through a number of conceptual problems characterized by the triad of ‘dearth of theoretical foundation,’ ‘particularist research questions,’ and ‘reductionist understanding of nutrition.’ The thesis presented here is that an interpretive framework based on nutritional biology is able to shed constructive light on the fundamental problems of nutritional science. In this context, the establishment of ‘nutritional biology’ as a basic discipline in research and education would be a first step toward recognizing the phenomenon of ‘nutrition’ as an oecic process as a special case of an organism–environment interaction. Modern nutritional science should be substantively grounded on ecological—and therefore systems biology as well as organismic—principles. The aim of nutritional biology, then, should be to develop near-universal ‘law statements’ in nutritional science—a task which presents a major challenge for the current science system.