Innovative culi-clinical nutrition in the Greco-Roman tradition - from simplicia to hyperpersonalized iucunditas

The culi-clinical approach to nutrition in healthcare aligns strikingly well with the way the earliest physicians—from Hippocrates to Galen—thought about food and health. Galen worked with a three-part division that is still recognizable today: simplicia, the pure, single substances; composita, the compound preparations in which multiple simplicia acquire new properties; and praeparata, the ingredients that gain a different quality through processing. This structure forms a solid historical basis for thinking about nutrition as a process of transformation.

Yet whereas Galen primarily focused on the effects of food on the body, the culi-clinical approach adds a fourth, crucial dimension: the experience of eating itself. Food is the output of a complex culinary process. Whether that food is experienced as pleasant is determined by the interplay between body and brain: taste perception is a physiological, neurological, ontogenetic and phylogenetic process, influenced by contextual factors—and moreover strongly individual.

It is precisely here that an additional layer emerges which Galen did not name, but which is indispensable in healthcare: iucunditas, the pleasantness of food. In culi-clinical practice this is not a luxury, but a necessary precondition for food intake. "Tasty" is the driver—without a pleasant flavour, aroma, texture and context, eating simply does not get going, especially not in patients with disturbed appetite or sensory hypersensitivity.

One could even say that the culi-clinical approach is a modern, neurobiologically underpinned continuation of a line of thought that is nearly two thousand years old, but expanded with a dimension that is essential in contemporary care: the subjective, individual perception of eating.

In a healthcare environment, where patients/clients often struggle with disturbed nutritional intake, this individual variation becomes even more complex. That is precisely why the culi-clinical approach fits so well within the Greco-Roman medical tradition while at the same time consciously diverging from it: food is seen not only as a material substance that affects the body, but as a dynamic interplay between preparation, body and brain, and context—with the aim of supporting the patient's well-being.