1Institute for Integrative Health Care and Health Promotion, School of Medicine, Witten/Herdecke University, 58455 Witten, Germany
2Institute of Nutrition, Consumption and Health, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Paderborn University, 33098 Paderborn, Germany
Cite as: Jankovic, N. (2025). Nutrition and Health in the Light of Mind-Body Medicine. THE MIND Bulletin on Mind-Body Medicine Research, 7, 1-3.
I must admit. When I was asked to write the next editorial for THE MIND I was delighted. The topic is clearly in my area of interest and expertise. But which topic should I follow in 900 words? Certainly, I do know people who easily talk about nutrition and sell themselves as “Mr. or Mrs. know it all”. However, in these cases I love to refer to a highly esteemed colleague, Dr. Mai Thi Nguyen Kim, who states in one of her videos: “Nichts an Ernährung ist einfach” i. e. nothing regarding nutrition, is easy. Hence, there is no way to briefly describe what is going on between nutrition and health. Well, I decided to invite you to join my personal journey in nutrition and health. From my time as a bachelor student at the University Gießen, I very well remember one of my lectures: “Prevent weight gain. It is much easier than losing it”.
Unfortunately, most people choose the difficult path. Obesity is one of the leading causes of chronic diseases. In 2022, the WHO published a report on the state of the obesity pandemic in Europe, in which 60% of European citizens are overweight or obese. Focusing on children one out of three are overweight or obese (Kluge, 2022). Worldwide the prevalence of obesity has even tripled since 1975 mainly due to progressively more sedentary lifestyles and the consumption of less healthy diets (Boutari & Mantzoros, 2022).
But what do we consider a healthy diet? When shall we start? And what do we want to prevent? As an early nutritional epidemiologist, I started to focus on the last stage of our lives, the elderly. And what did I learn? Basically, if we do follow the nutritional guidelines such as from the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020), even late in life, we are able to prevent chronic diseases (Jankovic et al., 2015) and increase our life span (Jankovic et al. 2014), while decreasing cognitive decline (Berendsen et al., 2017) or hip fractures (Benetou et al., 2018). It gets even more promising, when we follow health-targeted diets for instance as suggested by the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) in order to decrease the risk for the onset of cancer (Jankovic, 2018) with the greatest benefits for colorectal cancer (Jankovic et al., 2017).
After six years of research on the elderly, I felt the urgent need to elaborate on the power of nutrition much earlier in life, right from
the start. So, I started my work in the DONALD study, located in the heart of Dortmund, where data on infants, children, and adolescents have been collected since 1985. Here I did not simply focus on beneficial diets, nutrients or foods i.e. “what we eat” but also consider “when we eat” in terms of “chrono-nutrition” (Alexy et al., 2021). Chronotype defines the individual rhythm i.e. the internal clock. We largely talk about larks who wake up early / sleep early and owls representing the opposite. Both candidates are likely to have a different underlying metabolic rhythm.
Our research could show that the alignment between chronotype and timing of food consumption favors the body compositional development in adolescents (Jankovic et al., 2024). Under “normal circumstances” especially later chronotypes suffer from “social jetlag” (SJL) which describes a misbalance between social obligations (like early school starts) and the internal clock. Since SJL is associated with overweight (Jankovic et al., 2022) later chronotypes have an additional risk package due to higher SJL when it comes to health. During the corona-crisis however, SJL decreased quite dramatically which should be considered as a learning from the lock-down time (Perrar et al., 2023).
From the evidence mentioned above, it may be that we are predisposed to certain conditions. More importantly, we do have the power or need empowerment to change things in a way that fits our personality and benefits our health. For me, this is the point when Mind-body medicine comes into play of which nutrition is one key element e. g. in the sense of the BERN framework (Esch & Stefano, 2022). In this current issue of “THE MIND” we are all invited to dive deeper into the power of nutrition. May it be under the condition of mindful eating, feeling the connection to nature through diet, increasing the benefits of nutrition by the inclusion of physical activity, or improving health conditions like Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder or Multiple Sclerosis. Certainly, nutrition works best if we harmonize our lifestyle with the way we eat, and I hope you are just as curious as I am to start reading. Simply enjoy!
References
Alexy, U., Jankovic, N., Schmitting, S., Buyken, A. E. (2021). Chronobiologie und Ernährung. Aktuelle Ernährungsmedizin 46 (02), S. 95–104. DOI: 10.1055/a-1219-7355.
Benetou, V., Orfanos, P., Feskanich, D., Michaëlsson, K., Pettersson-Kymmer, U., Byberg, L. et al. (2018). Mediterranean diet and hip fracture incidence among older adults: the CHANCES project. Osteoporosis international: a journal established as result of cooperation between the European Foundation for Osteoporosis and the National Osteoporosis Foundation of the USA 29 (7), S. 1591–1599. DOI: 10.1007/s00198-018-4517-6.
Berendsen, A. A. M., Kang, J. H., van de Rest, O., Jankovic, N., Kampman, E., Kiefte-de Jong, J. C. et al. (2017). Association of Adherence to a Healthy Diet with Cognitive Decline in European and American Older Adults: A Meta-Analysis within the CHANCES Consortium. Dementia and geriatric cognitive disorders 43 (3-4), S. 215–227. DOI: 10.1159/000464269.
Boutari, C., Mantzoros, C. S. (2022). A 2022 update on the epidemiology of obesity and a call to action: as its twin COVID-19 pandemic appears to be receding, the obesity and dysmetabolism pandemic continues to rage on. Metabolism: clinical and experimental 133, S. 155217. DOI: 10.1016/j.metabol.2022.155217.
Esch, T., Stefano, G. B. (2022). The BERN Framework of Mind-Body Medicine: Integrating Self-Care, Health Promotion, Resilience, and Applied Neuroscience. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience 16, 913573. DOI: 10.3389/fnint.2022.913573.
Jankovic, N. (2018). Dietary Recommendations for Cancer Prevention. Reference Module in Food Science: Elsevier.
Jankovic, N., Geelen, A., Streppel, M. T., Groot, L. C. P. G. M. de, Orfanos, P., van den Hooven, E. H. et al. (2014). Adherence to a healthy diet according to the World Health Organization guidelines and all-cause mortality in elderly adults from Europe and the United States. American journal of epidemiology 180 (10), 978–988. DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwu229.
Jankovic, N., Geelen, A., Streppel, M. T., Groot, L. C. de, Kiefte-de Jong, J. C., Orfanos, P. et al. (2015). WHO guidelines for a healthy diet and mortality from cardiovascular disease in European and American elderly: the CHANCES project. The American journal of clinical nutrition 102 (4), S. 745–756. DOI: 10.3945/ajcn.114.095117.
Jankovic, N., Geelen, A., Winkels, R. M., Mwungura, B., Fedirko, V., Jenab, M. et al. (2017). Adherence to the WCRF/AICR Dietary Recommendations for Cancer Prevention and Risk of Cancer in Elderly from Europe and the United States: A Meta-Analysis within the CHANCES Project. Cancer epidemiology, biomarkers & prevention: a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, cosponsored by the American Society of Preventive Oncology 26 (1), S. 136–144. DOI: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-16-0428.
Jankovic, N., Schmitting, S., Krüger, B., Nöthlings, U., Buyken, A., Alexy, U. (2022). Changes in chronotype and social jetlag during adolescence and their association with concurrent changes in BMI-SDS and body composition, in the DONALD Study. European journal of clinical nutrition 76 (5), S. 765–771. DOI: 10.1038/s41430-021-01024-y.
Jankovic, N., Schmitting, S., Stutz, B., Krüger, B., Buyken, A., Alexy, U. (2024). Alignment between timing of 'highest caloric intake' and chronotype in relation to body composition during adolescence: the DONALD Study. European journal of nutrition 63 (1), S. 253–265. DOI: 10.1007/s00394-023-03259-w.
Kluge, H. H. P. (2022). WHO European regional obesity report 2022. Copenhagen: World Health Organization.
Perrar, I., Alexy, U., Jankovic, N. (2023). Chronobiological changes due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic among adolescents in the Dortmund Nutritional and Anthropometric Longitudinally Designed cohort study. European journal of pediatrics 182 (6), S. 2801–2805. DOI: 10.1007/s00431-023-04963-9.
WHO (2020): Healthy diet. Hg. v. WHO. Online verfügbar unter https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/healthy-diet, zuletzt geprüft am 28.03.2025.