A complex systems perspective of nutrition
Alberto Aleta 教授
2024 年 12 月 12 日 (星期四) 下午 17: 00
Humanity is facing a triple dilemma: to produce more food, ensure its nutritional adequacy, and avoid the unjustified expansion of cultivated lands at the expense of the native environment. But these complex issues cannot be solved in isolation. This talk is a summary of the steps we have taken to tackle this problem from a complex systems perspective, accounting for trade-offs and synergies that cannot emerge if studied in isolation. The links between social and environmental dynamics are complex and vary substantially from place to place and through time. Because of constraints in data availability, analytical methods, and a lack of understanding of how social and environmental objectives interact, there is no workable model that allows the optimization of food production while minimizing environmental and societal costs. Similarly, understanding the population’s dietary patterns and their impact on health requires many different sources of information that interact with each other. Nutritional epidemiology faces enormous challenges posed by measurement error and related consequences such as unknown confounders, and the inability to address complex exposures.
Throughout this talk, we will focus on vegetable oils as a case study. We will discuss a large array of problems, ranging from our current knowledge of food composition and its data gaps, the public debate on vegetable oils in social media, the controversial role of Nutri-score, or the environmental and socio-economic impacts of palm oil production in Indonesia. All these systems, and many others, interact with each other and play a major role in the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including reducing poverty, inequality, and hunger, improving health and education, while also meeting climate, biodiversity, and ecosystem goals.
Prof. Alberto Aletá is a Spanish physicist and data scientist expert on the field of Complex Systems. He is mostly known for his work on epidemic modelling, specially during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, his interests are very interdisciplinary, with contributions in fields like game theory, sustainable nutrition and social dynamics. Alberto’s work is characterised by the use of data driven approaches to model dynamical systems and a quest for unraveling the causal mechanisms behind the dynamics observed. His works often rely on the use of agent-based models, network science, higher-order networks and multivariate statistics. Alberto obtained his PhD in Physics (Cum Laude) from the Universidad of Zaragoza in 2019 and then he did a postdoc stay at ISI Foundation (Torino, Italy) until 2022. Recently he has been granted a Ramón y Cajal fellowship and is currently working at the Instituto Universitario de Investigación de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI).
撰写：任露洋
排版：陈仕发
一审一校：任露洋
二审二校：马将
三审三校：郑纯
