THE IMPORTANCE OF NUTRITION BASED ON INDIVIDUALIZED TEMPERAMENT (MIZAJ), FROM THE VIEW POINT OF TRADITIONAL PERSIAN MEDICINE AND THE FINDINGS OF MODERN MEDICINE

Objective: Nutrition is one of the most important factors today in prevention and maintaining health, as well as in treatment of diseases. Despite many efforts, the challenges related to nutrition are becoming more and more common every day. Persian medicine is one of the oldest medical approaches in the world, and nutrition has a special and fundamental place in this medical thought. So much so, that a large portion of Persian medicine is related to nutrition. Individualized nutrition in Persian medicine based on temperament (Mizaj) is well in correspondence today with the topic of nutrigenomics or nutrigenetic, or epigenetic, and strongly proposes a unique model of nutrition in a strategic way. This study focuses to describe the importance of nutrition based on individualized temperament from the perspective of Persian medicine and the findings of modern one. Materials and Methods: This study is a narrative literature review using keywords including Persian medicine, Traditional Persian medicine, temperament (Mizaj), nutrition, individualized nutrition, individualized medicine, precision nutrition, functional food, bioactive food, nutrigenomics, nutrigenetic, epigenetic, and TEF, in Persian and English were used to explore related articles in databases such as Pub Med and also using Google Scholar, without any time constraints. Extracted articles were carefully studied. Also, Persian medicine books and conventional medicine ones were studied. The relevant content were collected, reviewed and the results were written in the form of individualized nutrition, based on temperament. Findings: According to the principles of Persian medicine, the temperament of every healthy person is based on a balanced and specific range. Maintaining this range and its balance is cornerstone to a healthy person. On the other hand, and from view point of Persian medicine, all foods and drinks have their own temperament too. A review of modern scientific sources also shows that these topics have been considered by common medical science and in these sources, topics such as individualized nutrition and individualized medicine along with topics such as nutrigenomics, epigenetic, and nutrigenetic have been addressed. Also, the discussion about the quality of the effect of foods on the body of people, which has been presented in the form of functional food, is in accordance with the statements of Persian medical scholars about possession of different temperaments for foods. Conclusion: Findings of this article strongly suggests that, what current medicine emphasizes today on individualized nutrition that is essential to promote human health, which is known in the traditional Persian medicine, as personal temperament. Thus combination of traditional Persian medicine recommendations (in the form of holistic medicine), and modern medical science recommendations (in the form of analytic medicine), is essential to accelerate developments in the medical sciences.