1.1 Orientation to human nutrition The major purpose of this series of four textbooks on nutrition is to guide the nutrition student through the exciting journey of discovery of nutrition as a science. As apprentices in nutrition science and practice students will learn how to collect, systemize, and classify knowledge by reading, experimentation, observation, and reasoning.
The road for this journey was mapped out millennia ago. The knowledge that nutrition – what we choose to eat and drink – influences our health, well-being, and quality of life is as old as human history. For millions of years the quest for food has helped to shape human development, the organization of society and history itself.
It has influenced wars, population growth, urban expansion, economic and political theory, religion, science, medicine, and technological development. It was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that nutrition started to experience its first renaissance with the observation by scientists that intakes of certain foods, later called nutrients, and eventually other substances not yet classified as nutrients, influence the function of the body, protect against disease, restore health, and determine people’s response to changes in the environment.
During this period, nutrition was studied from a medical model or paradigm by defining the chemical structures and characteristics of nutrients found in foods, their physiological functions, biochemical reactions and human requirements to prevent, first, deficiency diseases and, later, also chronic noncommunicable diseases. Since the late 1980s nutrition has experienced a second renaissance with the growing perception that the knowledge gained did not equip mankind to solve the global problems of food insecurity and malnutrition.
