Please note, this is a sponsored article from DSM Nutritional Products Europe.
Peter Engel: Nutri-Facts is an initiative dedicated to providing customers, consumers, healthcare professionals and media representatives with generic, balanced scientific information on essential micronutrients such as vitamins and carotenoids.
At the initiative’s core, the website provides latest scientific news and established facts about health impacts, requirements and safety of micronutrients. The non-commercial initiative is supported by an external Scientific Advisory Board of international nutrition experts.
Engel: In addition to up to date micronutrient portraits, it offers background information on study results, expert comments, the results of international and national nutrition surveys and market research reports, and many more in English, German, French and Spanish.
All those interested have the option of adding a link to www.nutri-facts.org on their relevant websites in order to make this service available to consumers as well. Moreover, free services such as a monthly newsletter and RSS feed, which keep you automatically updated, are offered.
Engel: The majority of consumers obtain their knowledge about the efficacy and safety of micronutrients in fortified foods and dietary supplements from news reports in the mainstream media. This reporting tends to consist of negative sensationalist features, which frequently warn against consuming synthetic micronutrients. As a result, many consumers are needlessly wary and distrustful of products. This is especially problematic, as many national and international nutrition surveys show that certain parts of the population in developed countries don’t have adequate micronutrient intake.
In order to change the negative image of micronutrients coined through the media, and to provide a balanced information source, DSM Nutritional Products has developed the Nutri-Facts website, helping those interested to find their way around the complex world of micronutrients.
Engel: Although there is copious scientific evidence to support the importance of micronutrients, studies investigating their efficacy, requirements and safety sometimes come to conclusions that are less clear than expected, or even contradict expectations. This is actually not surprising, because the relationships between diet, health and disease are extremely complex and are affected by many factors. It’s correspondingly difficult to prove and influence these relationships.
The subject is so complex that even nutrition experts admit that many things are barely understandable for them, not to mention for non-professionals. Nevertheless, a lot of people talk and write about micronutrients in public.
Dr Peter Engel speaks on behalf of DSM Nutritional Products Europe. This is a sponsored article.
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