Abstract
Fundamental questions in nutrition include, "What constitutes a nutritionally balanced diet?", "What are the consequences of failing to achieve diet balance?", and "How does diet balance change across the lifecourse and with individual circumstances?". Answering these questions requires coming to grips with the multidimensionality and dynamic nature of nutritional requirements, foods and diets, and the complex relationships between nutrition and health, while at the same time avoiding becoming overwhelmed by complexity. Here we illustrate the use of an integrating framework for taming the complexity of nutrition, the Geometric Framework for Nutrition (GFN), and show how this might be used to untap the full potential for nutrition to provide targeted primary interventions and treatments for the chronic diseases of aging. We first briefly introduce the concepts behind GFN, then provide an example of how GFN has been used to relate nutrition to various behavioural, physiological and health outcomes in a large mouse experiment, and end by suggesting a translational pathway to human health.