As the U.S. military faces the twenty-first century, it must contend with changes in the nature of warfare and deployment that have significant implications for individual performance. The more frequent redeployment of soldiers (necessitated by downsizing and by changing military strategies) mandates greater concern for their physical health and well-being and, therefore, the development of cutting-edge techniques for field assessment of health and nutritional status. Such assessment tools must demonstrate reproducibility and reliability in field tests, must be noninvasive, and must cause minimal interference with battlefield operations. Reliance upon techniques that are tied to laboratories must give way to ambulatory assessment. Budgetary constraints, coupled with the need to stay at the forefront of research, dictate that careful consideration be given to identifying the best available and emerging technologies and making priority decisions regarding which ones should be undertaken directly by the military, which deserve investment of funds to foster military applications, and which are best left to the private sector.

In 1994, the Committee on Military Nutrition Research (CMNR) was asked by the scientists at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine (USARIEM) to identify and evaluate new technologies to determine whether the technologies; will provide useful tools to help solve important issues in military nutrition research in the areas identified by USARIEM. The committee was requested: (1) to provide a survey of newly available and emerging techniques for the assessment and optimization of nutritional and physiological status and performance, and (2) to evaluate the potential of these techniques to contribute to future research efforts involving military personnel. In addition, the committee was asked to make recommendations regarding the practicality and the application of such techniques in field settings and to include in its response the answers to the following six questions:

1.

Will the technologies be a significant improvement over current technologies?

2.

How likely are the technologies to mature sufficiently for practical use?

3.

What is the cost/benefit ratio of the new technologies, and how expensive (in both monetary and personnel terms) will they be to employ compared with the importance of the information they will provide?

4.

Are the technologies of such critical value that their development should be supported by Department of Defense funds—such as can be provided by the Small Business Innovative Research program?

5.

How practical are the technologies? Will they require dedicated personnel and complex, exotic equipment? Will the data provided be difficult to analyze?

6.

Can the technologies be used in the field (could they be used in the field or used to analyze samples collected in the field)?

Recognizing that there were a large number of technologies that could be reviewed and the need to limit the scope of this review to those areas of most interest to USARIEM, six relevant research areas for review were identified, with the primary criterion for inclusion being the possibility for application to field research: body composition, tracer techniques to evaluate metabolism and energy expenditure, ambulatory methods to determine energy expenditure, molecular and cellular approaches to nutrition and immune function, and functional and behavioral measures of nutritional status. To assist the CMNR in responding to the questions, a workshop was convened on May 22–23, 1995, in Washington, D.C., that included presentations from individuals with expertise in the aforementioned areas.

Committee members subsequently met with staff several times over the course of a year and a half and worked separately and together using the authored papers, additional reference materials provided by the staff, and personal expertise and experience with the methods to draft the overview, summary, conclusions, and recommendations, which were reviewed by an anonymous panel of peers according to National Research Council policy.

This report, Emerging Technologies for Nutrition Research: Potential for Assessing Military Performance Capability (IOM, 1997), looks at newer technologies that are being employed to identify and study basic issues that may be significant in nutrition research, with evaluation being limited to technologies discussed at the workshop. It provides responses to the questions posed to the CMNR, conclusions, and recommendations, as well 24 invited papers presented at the workshop.