Neurodevelopment, nutrition and genetics. A contemporary retrospective on neurocognitive health on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, India.

In celebration of the centenary of the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN), Hyderabad, India (1918-2018), a symposium highlighted the progress in nutrition knowledge made over the century, as well as major gaps in implementation of that knowledge. Brain famine caused by a shortage of nutrients required for perinatal brain development has unfortunately become a global reality, even as protein-calorie famine was largely averted by the development of high yield crops. While malnutrition remains widespread, the neglect of global food policies that support brain development and maintenance are most alarming. Brain disorders now top the list of the global burden of disease, even with obesity rising throughout the world. Neurocognitive health, remarkably, is seldom listed among the non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and is therefore seldom considered as a component of food policy. Most notably, the health of mothers before conception and through pregnancy as mediated by proper nutrition has been neglected by the current focus on early death in non-neurocognitive NCDs, thereby compromising intellectual development of the ensuing generations. Foods with balanced essential fatty acids and ample absorbable micronutrients are plentiful for populations with access to shore-based foods, but deficient only a few kilometres away from the sea. Sustained access to brain supportive foods is a priority for India and throughout the world to enable each child to develop to their intellectual potential, and support a prosperous, just, and peaceful world. Nutrition education and food policy should place the nutritional requirements for the brain on top of the list of priorities.

Nutritional armor in evolution: docosahexaenoic acid as a determinant of neural, evolution and hominid brain development.

The aim of this article is to draw attention to the special significance of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) in the brain, the potential relevance of its abundance to the evolution of the brain in past history, and now the relevance of paucity in the food supply to the rise in mental ill-health. Membrane lipids of photoreceptors, synapses, and neurons over the last 600 million years contained consistent and similarly high levels of DHA despite wide genomic change. The consistency is despite the DHA precursor differing only by 2 protons. This striking conservation is an example of Darwin's "Conditions of Existence," which he described as the higher force in evolution. A purpose of this article is to suggest that the present paradigm of food production currently based on protein requirements, should change to serve the specific lipid needs of the brain to address the rise in mental ill-health.(1.)

The origins of diversity: Darwin's conditions and epigenetic variations.

This short history of evolutionary thought during the last few centuries describes how some of our foremost thinkers have debated--and still do--the precise mechanisms at the roots of evolutionary change. Commentators frequently contradicted themselves, as well as each other. The popularity of Christian fundamentalism waned following the World Wars. Eventually the rug was pulled from beneath it--till a more recent reaction. Amidst all this babble coming from numerous towers of Babel over centuries, we failed to see Charles Darwin as the great environmentalist: who said environmental conditions, whilst working hand in glove with natural selection, constituted the more important 'law'. A bird's eye view of 18th and 19th century evolutionary thought is considered against the climate of those times (politics, industrial revolution, trade, religious expansionism, etc). Darwinism superseded Lamarckism helped by the neo-Darwinism of Weismann, higher mathematics, population genetics--the 'Modern Synthesis' of 1935--culminating in the discovery of the double helix by Watson, Crick et al, assuring us of the correctness of 'primacy of DNA theory'. Stimulation and challenge is currently fuelled by exciting nascent knowledge of epigenetic variations and Cairnsian 'adaptive mutations'. The work of Marcus Pembrey and Barry Keverne tracking human and animal variation back generationally describing how 'genomic imprinting' causes reversible heritable change from slight variations in the chromosomes of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and parents to be. The purpose of this thesis is to put forward a new theme proposed neither by Lamarck or Darwin. We stand on the threshold of the first paradigm change for 150 years.