Personal Presentation

(From the commemorative interview for the 50th anniversary of FCNAUP:)

 

What memories do you keep from your student days and from your early years as a lecturer at FCNAUP?
From my student days, I mainly remember the feeling of being in a small programme with a strong identity and a very particular culture—almost family-like—at a school where everyone knew one another.

We had no digital platforms or phone distractions, and the expression of the gaze wd as a means of communication. There was more time to study in cafés, to make mistakes and try again. In Nutrition, it felt as though everything was within our reach if we dared to try. When I was at AEFCNAUP, for example, I visited RTP-Porto, located at Monte da Virgem, to propose that they host us on World Food Day. They asked a few questions but readily agreed. I then spoke to Professor Norberto Teixeira dos Santos, our Director at the time, and the two of us went to RTP for a morning programme—I loved it. Professor Norberto had a great presence and a calm, precise, forward-looking discourse, a fine sign of a Full Professor of Paediatrics, a scholar of child nutrition, and an innovator.

For my undergraduate dissertation, I chose Adolescent Eating Behaviour, a study I conducted at the secondary school (Alexandre Herculano) where I had studied—one I loved—and where I taught Biology while still an FCNAUP student (so many teachers mark our lives… there, I was a student of Dr. Luís Meireles Vieira de Castro, who once, at the bar, asked me whether I knew how much effort the heart makes when drinking the coffee he had in his hand—the question was rhetorical, but as adolescents we were so fortunate to have people like that, provoking our curiosity, coincidentally in nutrition). When the thesis was finished, I took it in person to Jornal de Notícias—they asked me to wait; someone came to speak with me, and the next day I saw that they had done a full-page interview. I could hardly believe it, but it showed how civil society longed for the emergence of Nutrition.

As soon as I completed military service, I was able to return as a lecturer to what would become FCNAUP, and it was a relief to end that wait, since before military service I had been invited but could not accept because I had to report to the army.

My return followed the opening of a competition for Assistant Trainee, which opened the doors for me to learn under Dr. Emílio Peres—humanist, Professor, and Mentor. What more could one want? I, who had “pursued” him as a student whenever I learned of another lecture of his, at night, in the most diverse places… it was like going out to the theatre or a concert. Sometimes those communications—where everything seemed easy and effortless (a pure illusion)—also captivated me by their beauty (I needed some time to admire them, and that slowed me down), because they were often exercises in deep integration, presenting examples and scenarios where everything made the utmost sense, as if planned down to the finest detail (simplicity is an exercise of great complexity, as Professor Maria Manuel Valagão likes to remind us).

Once, I was delivering the closing presentation of a Congress at the Cupertino de Miranda Foundation (a very beautiful hall with a slope), and it was already late, the end of the day; moments after I began, I unexpectedly saw Dr. Emílio Peres arrive and sit in the last row. By great coincidence, I was projecting a slide with an ironic drawing by his daughter, Mafalda, to illustrate his Homo urbanus insapiens. I met his gaze for a few moments and felt many things…

After retiring, Dr. Emílio Peres always “gave” the first lecture of Human Nutrition—the course he founded and coordinated at FCNAUP—to everyone’s delight; today, in that same first lecture, we love to present his legacy to welcome new generations of future nutritionists. His matrix of ethics, humanity, and competence continues to be the best foundation for Education, in a project that never ends.

As a former student, what does it mean to you to teach here?
It means continuity—a word I value—knowing that the same line that began before me will continue after me.

It is also a privilege and a responsibility: teaching here entails the obligation to give back to the institution that trained me the same independence, anti-corporate spirit, and critical stance toward “uncritical authority” that have always characterised FCNAUP and my generation. And thus to be part of a line that does not deviate and believes that ethics and service to teaching, research, and health are what matter most.

In which scientific areas have you taught, and how have they contributed to the academic field of Nutrition Sciences?
Throughout my academic career, I have taught mainly in the areas of Human Food and Nutrition, which include Eating Behaviour, Nutrition Across the Life Course, and Interventions in Disease Prevention. These areas reflect the scientific path I have developed since the 1990s, integrating pedagogical, research, and community-intervention dimensions.

My experience in maternal and child nutrition began early, during four consecutive summers in Maranhão (Brazil), in volunteer work guided by Dr. Emílio Peres, focused on maternal and child health. This period profoundly shaped my scientific and research approach, later reinforced by the supervision of Professor Maria Fernanda Navarro in the same area.

Later, one of our most cited articles [Moreira P, Padez C, Mourão-Carvalhal I, Rosado V. Maternal weight gain during pregnancy and overweight in Portuguese children. Int J Obes (Lond). 2007 Apr;31(4):608-14] showed, for the first time, the association between excessive gestational weight gain (more than 16 kg) and childhood obesity, and was one of the four main studies that underpinned, in 2009, the revision of guidelines on gestational weight gain by the U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM).

In the domain of Chronic Disease Prevention, we have particularly explored the relationship between dietary intake, weight regulation, obesity–asthma, and nutrition across the life course. I had the privilege of collaborating with key figures, within and beyond the ISPUP research group (nutrition owes much to the internationally towering personality of Professor Henrique Barros—I had the privilege of helping him draft the first A4 sheet posting the dates of lectures by invited figures to the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, including Dr. Emílio Peres speaking on fibre), as well as Professor Maria Daniel Almeida, my PhD supervisor, Professor Isabel do Carmo, and Professor Daniel Sampaio, my supervisor, integrating clinical and psychosocial dimensions into teaching and research.

Research on nutritional interventions and clinical trials—supported by experience gained in projects such as iMC SALT, MERIT, TASTE, and childhood interventions—allowed us to introduce into teaching elements of experimental design, recruitment, intervention implementation, adherence assessment, and health-outcome analysis, bringing students closer to real-world research practice, and to produce patents for products to monitor and control salt intake, which today generate opportunities for technological valorisation and future integration into the industrial sector.

Experience in global health and nutrition projects in very different countries—such as Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe, Montenegro, and Eastern European countries, sometimes in collaboration with the World Health Organization—enabled me to bring a global nutrition perspective into teaching, particularly relevant to chronic diseases, from the sodium–potassium balance to the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV through strengthening nutritional status. At the community level, in Porto, work in emerging areas also helped affirm the importance of the nutritionist in pioneering activities. At the Porto City Council, for example, I coordinated activities in school food provision and had the opportunity to serve on the first jury of the international tender for school meal provision; in our recent research, we showed, for instance, that the nutritional quality and dietary diversity of lunch in those same schools was often higher than that of dinner at home.

On the pedagogical front, completing the Pedagogical Aptitude and Scientific Capacity examinations (1994), under the supervision of Dr. Emílio Peres, consolidated my commitment to educational innovation. Since then, we have developed active-learning practices, including pioneering blended-learning approaches, recognised by the University of Porto in 2004 and again in 2024 with the “Innovative Pedagogical Practice” Award.

Critical activity as an Academic Editor of international first-quartile scientific journals has also greatly helped refine critical judgement, deepen quality criteria, and better understand contemporary challenges in scientific production.

Are there bodies of knowledge that used to be taught and are now outdated? And others that have gained greater relevance?
Many things have changed, ich tools, basic and applied methodologies, and statistical analysis. We now understand that there were incorrect assumptions and unknown phenomena, and we have learned from mistakes to improve. In our area of interest, for example, regarding sodium, there is still considerable confusion about its role in different forms of brain and cardiovascular disease due to poor assessment methodology, and the discussion continues. Even so, we continue to study diet based on little more than 150 classical nutritional components, while foods contain more than 26,000 distinct molecules with potential health impact. For new students, the future could not be more stimulating, with the possibility of mapping diet using machine learning and AI, and needing ever less “dark matter” to understand how we eat and its impact on health and disease.

We must combine advances in knowledge of the foodome with other advancements and interface sciences, to explore the potential of clinical personalisation and public health interventions, and to view nutrition as an inexhaustible reservoir of integration.

From a more conceptual retrospective view of nutrition, it is clear that there were bodies of knowledge that, although taught for years, were later abandoned as outdated; but there are also new approaches that need greater prominence.

One example: nutritionists trained as I was, in the former Higher Course in Nutrition, were shaped for years by the dominant conceptual matrix—“nutritionism” (as termed by Gyorgy Scrinis). Nutritionism structured policies, guided communication, influenced practice and research in nutrition, and represented a “normal” moment grounded in the belief that health, including the prevention of chronic disease, could be understood mainly by isolating nutrients. Thus, in cardiovascular prevention, cholesterol and the limit of not exceeding 300 mg per day were discussed, for example, without properly framing the overall dietary pattern, substitution balances, food sources, food matrices, and quantities. This reductionist paradigm fragmented foods into components, excessively disconnecting them from dietary-pattern contexts and from cultural, social, and environmental experience. More recently, so-called “functional nutritionism” has also been questioned, namely for resting on the illusion of nutritional precision capable of identifying alleged specific benefits, sometimes fostering a “functional nutritionism” that goes “beyond basic nutrition” and “traditional nutrients.” It is therefore important to shift thinking toward a new paradigm that focuses on food as a whole and confronts the food polycrisis (a concept by Chris Barrett, agricultural economist at Cornell University).

Given current and future challenges in knowledge production—threats from fake science, fake news, AI hallucinations, and a time when science also faces subtler risks such as poorly managed conflicts of interest, unrecognised biases, and dangerous connections that can erode scientific integrity if not addressed with absolute transparency and rigour—it becomes clear that, more important than reciting ultra-recent publications, is cultivating what remains timeless: the ability to inoculate critical thinking within a matrix of integrity that allows knowledge to be applied and problems to be solved in any circumstance.

What were the most significant changes you observed over the years (institution, people, science)?
I would highlight the growing professionalisation and maturity, fully grounded in integrity and rigour. In a way, the University of Porto led the university-level training of nutritionists in the Iberian Peninsula; the institution grew, internationalised, placed nutritionists around the world in prominent positions, and projected a robust identity, in collaboration with other health professions, with prestige arising from high technical and scientific quality—almost like a brand.

For the organisation of the profession within the Order, FCNAUP was fundamental, producing leaders for the Portuguese Nutritionists Association, which in turn gave rise to and led the Order of Nutritionists.

With the transition to an Organic Unit (UO) and the emergence and relevance of the doctoral research it produced, FCNAUP changed science, people, and the profession itself. To give examples with which I was more directly involved in doctoral work, consider the exponential interventions in sport, asthma, and food allergy, and how the profession—and consequently people—benefited from this. The challenge now is not to lose this transformative potential, given FCNAUP’s past and present human capital, which confers this responsibility. But in the face of current challenges, including mental health, it will be necessary to complement this aspiration with a deeper study of which policies, supports, or other factors will contribute to the necessary well-being of students, faculty, and staff.

What were the most defining moments you experienced here?
Three transformative moments:

• The Presidency of AEFCNAUP—my greatest motivation arose from the need to work with Rector Alberto Amaral and the FCNAUP leadership, mobilising all student pressure to approve the new Bachelor’s Degree in Nutrition Sciences (which would replace the Nutritionism bachelor’s degree), and to see our cohort inaugurate the new curriculum—something we fortunately achieved.

• The creation of the Organic Unit (UO) in Nutrition Sciences—I remember holding a ticket to Milan to participate in a coordination meeting of international humanitarian aid at the MAIS association, something I very much wanted and would have done under the guidance of Dr. Emílio Peres, but I did not board so that I could accompany visits to all Presidents of the Executive Councils of the UP’s UOs. It was a time when many people set aside or postponed personal aspirations in the name of a greater good—FCNAUP. I accompanied Professor Maria Daniel Almeida (and at times Professor Flora Correia) on those visits. I particularly recall visiting Professor Marques dos Santos, then Director of FEUP, still on Rua dos Bragas, who would later become Vice-Rector and then Rector of UP—someone I consulted even after his retirement regarding the best financial strategy for the new (current) FCNAUP facilities.
  After individually explaining to members with Senate representation (we were not represented, as we were a course reporting to the Rectorate and not a UO like the other Faculties) the importance of transforming the Course into a UO, on the day of the Senate vote we remained outside the Rectorate—where ICBAS/FFUP now stands—listening to the result, which, as is well known, went very well.
  Who would have imagined that, in such a short time, we could move from teaching a renowned undergraduate degree that absorbed us so much to, as a UO, having the staffing foundations to drive the current eleven undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programmes? Perhaps one of the greatest tributes to the dream of our pioneering Professors. Having a Faculty where one breathes, from top to bottom, not only “nutrition sciences” but “nutrition and food sciences,” expanding a renewed commitment to public health, clinical practice, and collective food provision, and an academic whirlwind of programmes that propel us toward an integrated understanding of humans and the food system, in their cross-communication—from food to molecular mechanisms, technology, health, social justice, environment, and sustainability.

• Serving as Director of FCNAUP—and in particular the entire process of the new facilities—was an epic worthy of pre-WhatsApp times, made of persistence, meetings, negotiations, and a quiet resilience that extended to connections with students and the entire FCNAUP community, across countless small moments that, accumulated, create the true narrative of academic life. I recall in particular an ordinary meeting between the Rector and Directors on January 6 (easy to remember as it is my father’s birthday), when I asked to use a PowerPoint presentation—I even said, “you can rest assured I won’t give a lecture”—to set out unequivocally the terms necessary to realise our facilities. At the end, I sent everyone, in writing and for the minutes, everything I had said and that concerned us, exactly as it had occurred, for future memory. I remember with deep institutional gratitude the immediate friendly responses I received. Ultimately, it was something we achieved.

How do you imagine the future of FCNAUP?
I imagine a more international, more interdisciplinary, more critical, more interventionist institution, faithful to its roots of rigour, public service, and independence—incapable of aligning with what is merely politically convenient—in homage to Emílio Peres: “Having the courage to stick one’s head out, knowing one might lose it.”