The New Encyclopedia of Nutrition: A Reality after COVID-19

The New Encyclopedia of Nutrition: A Reality after COVID-19

Sima Hamadeh^*Department of Nutrition and Dietetics Sciences, Haigazian University, Beirut, Lebanon

Received date: October 07, 2020; Accepted Date: October 13, 2020; Published date: October 22, 2020;

^*Corresponding author: Sima Hamadeh, Department of Nutrition and Dietetics Sciences, Haigazian University, Mexique Street, Kantari, P.O.Box: 11-1748, Riad El Solh 1107 2090, Beirut, Lebanon. Tel: +9611349230; Email: sima.hamadeh@haigazian.edu.lb

Citation: Hamadeh S (2020) The New Encyclopedia of Nutrition: A Reality after COVID-19. Adv in Nutri and Food Sci: ANAFS-198.

Abstract
COVID-19 world pandemic has a huge impact on global development, peoples’ lifestyles, and the future of nutrition. The aim of this research is to illustrate a holistic picture of nutrition (food and sports) trends and projections after COVID-19 along with the drivers largely responsible for these observed trends. A narrative review of literature covering nutrition treated fields during COVID-19 was collected from different sources including PubMed. A content analysis of the collected data helped to illustrate an innovative model to approach the reality of a second nutrition transition “SNT” during and after COVID19. Results showed that populations are experiencing a new relation with nutrition and healthy lifestyles in general, and with food and sports for family and mood in particular. Food security and food safety matters have increased as consequences of rising people immunity and fighting deaths. E-sports is also a growing field for overall human wellbeing during quarantine. The diverse nature of this SNT may be the result of several factors such as health, economic, and sociocultural factors, and consumer characteristics. Moreover, countries’ profiles, built environments and architectural styles have implications for health by virtue of being factors in facilitating the SNT that is associated with changing lifestyles and affecting human wellbeing. The author concluded that a new encyclopedia of nutrition involving integrated nutrition issues such as e-commerce for food and beverages, online sports competitions is a reality for suitable understanding of food and sports consumerism trends and projections worldwide. Future food, sports and nutrition policies must consider multidisciplinary sectors, thereby enabling the development of coherent and sustainable strategies that will ultimately benefit food chain, public health and the globe environment during emergency settings.

Keywords: COVID-19; Digitalized Food Systems; E-food commerce; E-sports; Nutrition Economics; Nutrition Encyclopedia; Public Health Nutrition; Second Nutrition Transition

Background
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by a newly identified coronavirus in Wuhan China where a cluster of pneumonia cases was reported in December 2019. In March 2020, WHO announced the COVID-19 as a pandemic after being deeply concerned by its alarming spread and severity, and its levels of inaction worldwide [1].

The rapid global spread of the COVID-19 has demonstrated that no matter how successful each country is at fighting this pandemic at their homes, the threat will never stop unless the virus is battled around the world [2]. The best way to prevent and slow down its transmission is to be well informed about the virus (symptoms, contamination, etc.) and the disease it causes. For instance, washing hands or using an alcohol based rub frequently, avoid touching faces and shaking hands, enforce social distancing and boosting the immune system by appropriate eating and exercising patterns are best ways of protection from the virus infection [1].

Besides, COVID-19 world pandemic imposed measures of self-isolation, social distancing, global lockdown and repatriation known to be imperative in limiting the fast spread of the virus and the containment of the disease [3]. These measures created severe repercussions on both demographic characteristics and markets need, a situation that requires national efforts to closely monitor and study the demand and supply dynamics specifically of health-related products such as food and sports products to boost immunity [4] and mood [5]. Such measurements applied global economic losses [6], major shifts in dietary and lifestyles patterns, and new set of challenges for the individuals, communities and countries to maintain healthy lifestyles [7, 8]. In response to this situation, an adapted version of the ecological model used to explain health behaviors was presented as a multilevel framework for action and recommendations by Naja et al. [7] to support and maintain optimal nutrition especially food security issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, all efforts done in response to the dietary and lifestyles shifts since the outbreak neglected the need to consider the rapid shifts in stages of lifestyles and where does the public health systems fit into this? [1, 6, 9].

Experiences from previous viruses’ outbreaks have shown that a global threat such as COVID-19 requires a comprehensive coordinated global action where public health activities should expand to cover individuals, communities and global levels of action [1, 10]. More specifically, it is crucial for nutrition and lifestyles analyses that inter-professionalism efforts be coordinated to create partnership with various key actors and to source funding for a coalition within sectors that would make the monitoring evaluation of nutrition issues a regular activity even beyond the COVID-19 period [7, 11-41, 12]. For instance, monitoring food prices around the countries is important for food security analyses [6, 8] and studying the nutrition transition impact is also important for health and environmental concerns [6, 12, 13].

A huge number of reports, studies and stories took in depth look at the global response and COVID-19’s impact on populations’ health and lifestyles, global development and the future of the food security and safety [6-9, 14]. The present study aimed to illustrate a holistic picture of nutrition (food and sports) trends and projections after COVID-19 along with the drivers largely responsible for these observed trends.

In the following sections, we detail our methodology, analysis and emergent results. We conclude with proposing an innovative model for the New Nutrition Encyclopedia after COVID-19 and discussing its practical opportunities for future implications within a new food and sports sociocultural contexts.

Method
In this short communication, a narrative review was conducted to explore the major shifts in dietary and healthy lifestyles patterns occurring in consequence of COVID-19 outbreak and the global lockdown. As a first step, most scrutinized literature covering nutrition (food and sports) treated fields during COVID-19 was collected from different sources including PubMed, Google scholar, governmental dashboards, WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization “FAO” reports, and social media platforms. The databases were searched with terms and variations of the following: food, “beverage” OR “drink” OR “food for immunity/COVID-19”; AND sports and COVID-19, “physical activity” OR “exercise” OR “sports at home” OR “online sports”; AND healthy lifestyles during COVID-19 OR “wellbeing during COVID-19”.

As a second step, a content analysis of the collected data from scientific articles, reports, media news, social media, blogs, interactive dashboards, stories and verbatim scripts revealing the most commonly reported nutrition (food and sports) themes during the period under review was conducted. Whereas, recent trends and projections in the food and sports areas were taken into consideration to identify new realities and priority challenges to be addressed for improving nutrition, food consumption and lifestyles patterns after COVID-19. Finally, the in-depth synthesis used in this review helped to illustrate a model for the new encyclopedia of nutrition to approach the reality of a Second Nutrition Transition “SNT” during and after COVID19.

In the following results section, we draw upon multiple scientific evidences and informants’ stories to showcase the proliferation of new tendencies in today’s COVID-19 digitally enriched markets. Importantly, this review looks into nutrition issues during and after COVID-19 in three major sections including: food, sports and SNT.

Results
Findings from science and media extracts, and public perceptions revealed how the pandemic has changed the way consumers think about food, sports and wellbeing. The definition of healthy is evolving and immune health is gaining serious mindshare. How the immune health matters, and how the food, sports and hospitality industries are innovating in the COVID-19 era are also examined in the following results. We also argue that such a shift has given rise to the new concepts of built environment and architectural styles in restaurants, gymnasiums, worksites, etc. The following figure (figure 1) presents some examples related to healthy lifestyles concepts and built environments necessities during and after the pandemic from articles, blogs, and stories published, shared and liked by registered dietitians, journalists, science communicators and others.

Figure 1: Examples of articles, blogs and stories titles related to healthy lifestyles and environments during COVID-19.

Food

Populations are experiencing a new relation with food, nutrition and healthy lifestyles in general, and with food and sports for family and mood in particular [15-17]. For instance, food safety and food security matters have increased as consequences of rising people immunity and fighting deaths [6, 7, 18].

With people staying home, in-home eating patterns and culinary practices have been reset and probably will persist even after returns to normal post COVID-19 life. Many consumers are emerging with more of a “homebody” mindset, this increase adoption of the e-commerce, online groceries shopping, and innovative delivery services such as the autonomous mobile robot used to deliver food to people door-step during COVID-19 lockdown in the United States of America [19, 20]. Such autonomous food delivery robots combined to a mobile technology application and partnering with restaurants and other retail stores can make delivery services smarter, safer, faster, secure and more cost-efficient [20-22]. The e-commerce and robot delivery services are key trends accelerated by the COVID-19 outbreak and will revolutionize food and package deliveries, offering convenient new services that improve people everyday life. This increased adoption of e-commerce is an additional impetus for food retail and services industries to digitize their supply chains and delivery systems [19, 21-23]. Indeed, the global pandemic is bringing us closer to the virtual world, artificial intelligence “AI” and the robot take out future at all levels and in all contexts [21,24-25]. For instance, “Box’d” is the first fully automated contact-free casual dining restaurant opened in Toronto Canada during COVID-19 based on digital cubby technology combined to consumers’ mobile technology application [26].

“There is a lot of change coming-I don’t think we’ll be making 5000 square foot restaurants anymore. We’re now looking at opening ghost kitchens that would focus strictly on delivery”-CEO of Paramount Fine Foods and Box’d owner.

According to some food industries, the excessive use of AI solutions [24] to understand consumers’ needs during this pandemic can be a reason to approach the era of nutrition personalization in food and sports products over the coming decade [16,17,27,28].

Apart from a surge in demand for e-commerce and digital food retail solutions, some restaurants and consumers prefer the on-place experience with social distancing respected or with maze-like PVC plastic partitions between tables to ensure customers maintained distance. Therefore, socializing during and after COVID-19 pandemic will urge new built environment and architectural styles not only in restaurants and food point of sales but also in gyms, worksites, schools and other settings [29].

Notwithstanding these new healthy lifestyles concerns and the retail digital transformation, understanding the dynamic between an increased attention on immune health and individuals’ decreased economic power is also an opportunity to recognize and address the deeper limitations of existing public health nutrition science-policies systems and their interfaces with the society at all levels during emergency situations such as COVID-19 pandemic [1, 6]. Inter-professionalism collaboration across scientists and experts in the nutrition economic field is a powerful way of bringing scientific evidence to the attention of decision-and policy-makers to inform the development of new public health actions or to scale up the initiatives in place [1, 11, 30]. For instance, international entities such as WHO are helping the open public health science movement to progress towards establishing global norms that can help with national capacities to implement them wisely and to build public trust in them [1,9].

Besides, it is noteworthy that the increased rate of unemployment and the digitalization of the food chain during the COVID-19 outbreak will accelerate worldwide the solicitation of the employee-sharing scheme concept for workers in various food sectors such as dining, hospitality, movie theatres, catering and others [6, 31]. Certainly, the employee-sharing scheme concept is something worth exploring further in forthcoming nutrition economic studies [31].

Therefore, there is a need for more orchestrated transformative approach to food chain, resulting in more comprehensive and integrative food systems and hence more resilient in emergency contexts such as COVID-19 pandemic [29, 32].

Sports World

From its earliest formulation, sports world has pictured itself as a progressive force and a satisfying mode for health improvement and social good. Sports science and sports industry do not live in a vacuum and are framed by context [9]. Thus, changing social contexts and lifestyles patterns due to COVID-19 pandemic, and sports world will follow [33, 34]. For instance, canceling or postponing sports events globally was a necessary step to slow and stop the rapid spread of the COVID-19 [9, 33].

In order to understand the impact of this pandemic on sports industry, the iSportconnect Insights conducted on April 2020 a special COVID-19 survey study with more than 130 sports business professionals [35]. The survey showed in statistics many opportunities and challenges to encounter during and after this pandemic (figure 2) including an increase focus on data and digital engagement, which will help the sports industry in: 1) the penetration of many markets; 2) broadening public accessibility and reaching new audiences on global scale; and 3) tackling several challenges such as extreme environments or climate conditions, lockdowns and others [35].

Moreover, new trends started to materialize within the sports industry demanding an increase creativity regarding sports content creation and developing innovative revenue streams such as the Off-motor race location (e.g.; Extreme E is a top level off-motor racing) [33, 34, 36]. Some expected follow up effects of such E-sports competitions would be the increase in the digital rights and the decrease in the TV rights [36, 37]. Moreover, the important question to ask in the emerging era of E-sports is “Are we promoting new sedentary or detrained athletes’ profiles?” [16-17, 38].

Figure 2: Impact of COVID-19 on sports industry (adapted from iSportconnect Insight [35]).

Today’s digital world offers opportunities for promoting active healthy lifestyles for individuals confined at home to exercise alone or with their families that we couldn’t imagine a few decades ago [9, 15, 38]. E-sports and online lifestyle coaching are undeniably growing fields for overall human wellbeing during quarantine and a new modeling factor for a new nutrition transition phase [9, 15, 38, 39]. But those same promising opportunities can quickly turn to risks in the absence of controlling the flood of information available online or via media channels [16, 34]. For instance, the information shared and liked/disliked via social media platforms on a 24/7 basis has resulted in rich information but poor attention to content details [37]. Now more than ever, exceptional sports policies with keen consideration of the sports content in the digital universe created by consumers, bloggers, influencers and social media users not by the sports professionals is fundamental to build successful public health nutrition strategies and to redirect the nutrition economics concepts [16, 40, 41]. For that, evidence and informative data including insights of sports professionals and industrials, and perspectives of the sports fans is becoming crucial to support future partnerships profile in the post-COVID sports world [9, 16 ,33]. Such evidence will also help to answer fundamental questions about how the COVID-19 will leave its mark on the health, in particular heart health [33, 42, 43], and performance [16,44] of infected athletes. Learning lessons from this global pandemic crisis, must ensure sport industries, managers, professionals and fans are better prepared for the post-COVID sports world and future digitalized societies [9, 34].

The Second Nutrition Transition “SNT”

Over the last decades, globalization has significantly influenced local and global food consumption patterns and sports culture [45, 46]. This evidence is highly relevant and provides a strong rationale for the dramatic shift in the manners the entire globe eats, drinks and moves as a consequence of the nutrition transition [41, 47, 48]. In other words, Popkins [49] defined the First Nutrition Transition “FNT” model as the shift in dietary patterns and energy expenditures of individuals in response to economic, demographic and epidemiologic changes, whereas globalization, international trade and commercialization are major factor shaping the FNT and enhancing the emergence of chronic diseases associated to the consumption of unhealthy food and beverages and to sedentary lifestyles.

Within the COVID-19 global lockdown, the agro-food chain and the sports world have imposed new networks and sales systems that modified consumption habits and lifestyles patterns [9, 50]. This impact involves loss in normal food [6-7] and sports practices [33,51] that have contributed historically to the identity of the modern consumerism and nutrition economics, and have configured an open rich and complex food and sports universe. Hence, the globe could be described as passing through a SNT during this pandemic in which new definitions, areas and disciplines coexist. (Table 1) presents a comparison of food and sports patterns and their perceived links to health before and after COVID-19. Additionally, the table summarizes the shifts in nutrition and healthy lifestyles concepts during the pandemic, which describes the new trends of the SNT epoch.

Nutrition before & after COVID19			New Trends
Patterns and practices	Before	After	“SNT”
	Food diversity	Local food	E-commerce for food, beverages and sports New architectural styles and concept for healthy and safe built environment
	Eating out (with friends)	Eating at home (with families)
	Convenient meals	Cooking home meals
	Restaurants delivery (fast food)	Super markets delivery (all items including raw food) Automated robots’ delivery system
	Sports competitions (Live events)	Sports events canceled / E-sports competitions
	Exercise at gymnasiums	Exercise at home / E-coaching
	Open crowded places (restaurants, gyms, supermarkets, worksites, etc.)	Open places isolated by PVC plastic or with social distancing setting Or closed personalized / individualized places
Health	Nutrition for body image	Nutrition for mood	Nutrition for immunity boosting and psychology (Family-based) Holistic wellbeing and lifestyle coaching
	Nutrition for chronic diseases	Nutrition for infectious diseases
	Sports for body self-acceptance & socializing	Sports for wellbeing and stress management
	Individual-type of activities	Family-type of activities
	General yet diversified nutrition information	Specific and focused nutrition information

Table 1: Nutrition patterns and its health related issues before and after COVID-19 and their projections on the SNT trends.

The diverse nature of this “SNT” may be the result of several factors such as health, economic, sociocultural factors, and consumer characteristics [51]. Moreover, countries’ profiles [6, 24], built environments and architectural styles [26, 52] have implications for health by virtue of being factors in facilitating the SNT that is associated with changing lifestyles during and after COVID-19 and affecting the human wellbeing.

Discussion
A large body of evidence suggests there are many challenges to the rapid changing face of food and sports market insights during and beyond COVID-19 such as the structure of the existing food systems (e.g.; neoliberal trade to local market) [50] and the social life of sports (e.g.; group classes of sports to individual e-coaching) [37, 39]. The new reality of nutrition is influencing the consumers’ attitudes and preferences, and the food chain value including the local produces, industry processes and retail landscapes [50, 51].

In a move away from traditional approaches, understanding the consumer behavior and the interactions between key stakeholders and the causal food and sports exchange dynamics amid COVID-19 outbreak is required to identify deep public health nutrition strategic leverage points [9, 11, 30]. Therefore, the use of robust digital alternatives and valuable technologies such as AI [25] and Augmented Reality “AR” apps [53] (applications that integrates digital sensory modalities content into the user real world environment) is primary in food and sports industries lines including Research and Development “R&D”, production and marketing activities especially those undertaken in developing new services or in revolutionizing the Fast Moving Consumer Goods “FMCG” innovation such as packaged food, sports products, nutritional products and supplements, and others [51, 54]. Consequently, there is a need for a strategic partnership with technology companies to design pertinent research methodology to collect and analyze relevant data for FMCG innovation. For instance, substitute the traditional field-based research data collection by the tech/data-led solutions and use of long-tale data analysis strategy for better and easier understanding of the food and sports culture at local level and future level respectively [24]. Analyzing long-tale data covers the examination of local data and non-mainstream data where local data helps to increase understanding of trends adaptation to local food/sports/health culture and norms, and non-mainstream data helps to increase the chance of finding early signals of future nutrition trends [24].

The pervasion of technology information into the health system is gaining momentum but it is important to not let the digital governance and technology information jump ahead of the health and nutrition sciences [24, 55]. More specifically and while there is certainly value to engaging the technology sector and the media and digital literacy in COVID-19 outbreak and pandemic rapid response, it is prudent not to let health related mis-and dis-information around COVID-19 overshadow the science [24, 56]. In response to this “infodemic”, Internews-an international nonprofit organization-launched a strategic approach to help building healthy information environments around the globe with multi-professionals’ partnership including active partners from media outlets, social media influencers, technologists, information researchers and others [57].

“Healthy information environments are defined by the presence of good accurate evidence-based information-information that everyone can access safely; that consumers know how to critically assess; that is valued by business models that work, and that governments and businesses are accountable for keeping it that way” Internews 2020

Although many considerable health or communication organizations are also tackling this infodemic in a vast variety of ways, but few have the understanding of the local context, in the local language, with the direct and trusted access to local information partners across so many countries in the world [1,9]. To this end, it is crucial to understand the importance of using trustworthy scientific information that can save lives and to improve the information environments in emergency situation such as COVID-19 [55, 57]. By this, experts in communication, health and technology are able to uplift local voices to the globe level, and to address global challenges at the community level [41, 55, 58, 59].

Given the importance of food consumption and productions trends, and sports patterns as drivers of health and environmental pressures, vital steps must be taken to monitor the nutrition reality after COVID-19 through analysis of scientific and grey data, development of new methods and indicators, and deployment of innovative public health nutrition policy guidelines [9,60,61]. For all the above reasons, and because it concerns the globe, the new nutrition encyclopedia concept is illustrated in this short communication (figure 3) as an intangible edifying legacy with nutritional, economic, technological, sociocultural and environmental characteristics that make it particularly relevant as a model for the SNT trends and future nutrition projections characterizing the post-COVID world.

Figure 3: An innovative model for the New Nutrition Encyclopedia after COVID-19.

The importance of this innovative model as a new reality after COVID-19 lies not only on its specific modernized food and sports terms, but also in the methods used to characterize and analyze it, and the philosophy of e-world that is at its core. Therefore, this short communication provides an improved understanding of: 1) the post-COVID-19 food, sports and nutrition themes, 2) the complexity of interactions between multidisciplinary key stakeholders and nutrition health-related outcomes, 3) integrating the necessity for coordination within and across all levels of food systems as well as across different sectors (private and public), institutions (education, commerce, design, sports, life coaching) and disciplines (nutrition, food sciences, health, technology, media, economy, psychology, journalism). Furthermore, the new nutrition encyclopedia model can be used as an analytic tool that may assist in planning for nutrition programs and policies aimed at complex emergent public health and social problems such as COVID-19. Nonetheless, post COVID-19 nutrition policies dealing with novel food and sports concepts should be dynamic, driven by technology information and adapted to the domestic reality [51, 61].

Conclusion
A new encyclopedia of nutrition involving integrated nutrition issues such as e-commerce for food and beverages and online sports competitions is a reality for suitable understanding of food and sports consumerism trends and projections worldwide. Future food, sports and nutrition policies must consider multidisciplinary sectors, thereby enabling the development of coherent and sustainable strategies that will ultimately benefit food chain, public health and the globe environment during emergency settings.

Disclosure Statements
Acknowledgments: Not applicable.
Sources of funding: This research received no grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or non-profit sectors.
Conflict of interest: The author declares that there are no competing interests.
Authors’ contribution: S.H. conceived the concept, designed the overall short communication, and developed the innovative model of the new encyclopedia of nutrition after COVID-19.
Ethics: ethics approval was not required for this study as all products were publically available.

Authors’ Contribution: The contribution of Sima Hamadeh, Ph.D., to this article is significant. Dr. Hamadeh planned the study, analyzed the data, developed the innovative model of the new encyclopedia of nutrition after COVID-19, and wrote the manuscript.

References