The Meaning of Human Nutrition: Pergamon Bio-Medical Sciences Series
By Mina W. Lamb and Margarette L. Harden
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The Meaning of Human Nutrition - Mina W. Lamb
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The Study of Nutrition
Publisher Summary
Nutrition is the result of dietary practices after foods have been eaten, digested, and nutrients absorbed into the blood. It is the science of nourishing the body—the food that is eaten and the way that the body uses it. The nutrients in food are those chemical components of the food that perform one of three roles in the body: (1) to supply energy, (2) to regulate body processes, or (3) to promote the growth and repair of body tissue. People throughout life have need for the same nutrients but in different amounts. Therefore, the body is the product of nutrition. Heredity provides the blueprint for the body, and nutrition supplies the building materials. The science of nutrition is a relative youngster in the scientific field. However, at present, nutrition occupies an important place in a number of college and university curricula, including home economics, animal science, horticulture, medicine, and the allied health or paramedical fields. With the rapid advances in research, knowledge of nutrition is constantly expanded, and new interpretations and applications are presented. The primary source of this expansion in knowledge of nutrition is in the pure sciences of chemistry and physics applied to biological structures and processes. This chapter provides an overview of the study of nutrition. It highlights the basic preparations that need to be made for the study of human nutrition.
What Basic Preparations Need to be Made for the Study of Human Nutrition?
A student in pursuit of knowledge about any given subject should be well informed about the publications produced for such a study. The current explosion of knowledge makes a list of references from journals almost obsolete before the printing is completed. Nonetheless, the generally accepted books of any one period should be available to the conscientious student.
Some books are timeless in their value and need to be part of the educational background of a student who undoubtedly will want to include such publications in a personal professional library.
A teacher would guide students to evaluate books to select for a specific need at any given time.
OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY OF HUMAN NUTRITION
From early childhood, people are taught that the basic physical needs of man are food, shelter, and clothing. Since the beginning of recorded history, man has struggled desperately to acquire enough to eat. History records a select few who indulged heavily in consumption of excessive food (e.g., King Henry VIII), but the mass of humanity has been highly concerned with filling its stomach,
not questioning whether the food had a purpose or a function as long as it relieved hunger. Only since 1890 to 1910 has the function of food been given serious consideration by men in research and medicine. Since 1910 they have been trying to describe a recommended diet
for a long healthy life. Much confusion has reigned in the struggle to define an adequate diet, as is illustrated by Ronald Deutsch in his book entitled Nuts Among the Berries, by Frederick J. Simoons in Eat Not This Flesh, and by Gerald Carson in the illustrated history of patent medicines
entitled One for a Man and Two for a Horse and in his Cornflake Crusade. Other authors have conveyed the complexity of man’s concern for food in such books as The American and His Food by Richard O. Cummings, The Geography of Hunger by Josue’ De Castro, Attack on Starvation by Norman W. Desrosier, and The Ecology of Malnutrition by Jacques M. May. Prominent among all these treatises is A History of Nutrition by E. V. McCollum which further reflects the fact that man had great difficulty in clearly defining an adequate diet.
Man long has been confused about what to eat. However, only recently through economic prosperity and abundant agricultural production of food in the United States have the majority of people had a choice in what to eat. As a result food fads, quackery, and unwise food selections have increasingly become a major concern of those who are abreast of research and are genuinely concerned about human health.
Few discoveries in medicine have been met with wider acclaim than the revelation that certain components in foods markedly improve man’s ability to live longer and to perform more effectively. Most people believe their state of health from day to day depends on what they eat. Few people realize the profound effect of the afferent stimuli to the brain from the sensory reaction to sight, smell, touch, and taste of the food. Conditioning and learning are also important to the acceptance of foods. Diets vary with cultures, races, nations, and even with regions and the seasons of the year, but nutrition is universal.
Nutrition is the result of dietary practices after foods have been eaten, digested, and nutrients are absorbed into the blood. Nutrition is the science of nourishing the body – the food that is eaten and the way that the body uses it! Graham Lusk in 1906 at Physiological Laboratory, Cornell University Medical College and the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology in his classic treatise, The Science of Nutrition gave this definition: Nutrition may be defined as the sum of the processes concerned with growth, maintenance and repair of the living body as a whole or of its constituent organs.
These processes include the chain of events whereby the nutrients obtained from food reach the individual cells where they are used for energy, built into the cellular structure, or become constituents of compounds performing a regulatory function. Thus the nutrients in food are those chemical components of the food that perform one of three roles in the body: to supply energy, to regulate body processes, or to promote the growth and repair of body tissue. All people throughout life have need for the same nutrients but in different amounts. Therefore, the body is the product of nutrition; heredity provides the blueprint for the body, and nutrition supplies the building materials.
LAYMAN’S VIEW OF PHYSIOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS OF FOOD
In its broadest sense, the subject of nutrition is concerned with those physiological functions of the body related to the nutritive constituents of foods and to a chain of events whereby these constituents become available for utilization by the cells. Elimination of wastes and the regulatory mechanisms of the body must be considered as a part of the nutritional processes.
In discussions on the nutritive needs of the body, the terms diet, food, foodstuff, and nutrient have been used. These terms are sometimes used synonymously; foodstuff was the original term to refer to the constituent substances of food and had essentially the same meaning as nutrient in current usage. Natural foods usually contain more than one nutrient; for example, analysis shows that milk is composed of water, protein, fat, carbohydrate, mineral salts, and vitamins. On the other hand, food extracted from natural agricultural products may be pure, as for example, oil from cottonseed or corn, starch from corn, sugar from beets or from the sap of sugar cane, and many others.
Nutrition now occupies an important place in a number of college and university curricula, including home economics, animal science, horticulture, medicine, and the allied health or paramedical fields. With the rapid advances in research, knowledge of nutrition is constantly expanded and new interpretations and applications are presented. The primary source of this expansion in knowledge of nutrition is in the pure sciences of chemistry and physics applied to biological structures and processes. An example of this type of research is that which resulted in the identification of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule identified as a key structure in heredity.
The science of nutrition is a relative youngster in the scientific field; The American Institute of Nutrition was recognized as a distinct field in 1934. In order to anticipate the forward direction that research in nutrition may take, a backward review of the past is helpful.
Historical Background
Nutrition is a comparatively new member of the group of biological sciences. Hippocrates in 607 B.C., however, realized that certain foods were necessary for proper development of the body and recommended various diets for different conditions. Leonardo da Vinci presented definite ideas about food along with his work as an artist, sculptor, inventor, and designer of a submarine.
The date of the actual conception of nutrition can be placed in the latter part of the eighteenth century when the great French chemist, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier in 1783, produced experimental evidence that the heat of the animal body is derived from the oxidation of carbon and hydrogen similar to the process utilized in a flame. Lavoisier and the French physicist, Laplace, put guinea pigs in a chamber surrounded by ice and from the amount of ice melted in a certain period of time, they measured the heat given off by the animals. A determination of the oxygen consumed and the carbon dioxide produced by these animals showed that only 81% of the oxygen combined with hydrogen to form water. A calculation of the heat produced by oxidation of both the carbon and hydrogen gave figures very close to those obtained with the ice calorimeter.
Lavoisier next attempted to apply the results of his observations to a human subject, using an associate, Seguin. A drawing made from memory by Mme Lavoisier after the death of her husband in 1794 shows Seguin breathing through a mask into a series of globes, which afforded a means for determining the oxygen consumed and the carbon dioxide exhaled. The exact method of the experiments is unknown since Lavoisier was executed by the Paris Commune before he was able to publish his results in full. Fortunately, an abstract of this work was published which sets forth conclusions so fundamental to the development of a knowledge of nutritional processes as to earn for Lavoisier the right to be regarded as the Father of the Science of Nutrition.
The French physiologist, Francois Magendie (1783–1855) was the first to differentiate among the food constituents and evaluate them experimentally through animal studies. The modern viewpoint that several kinds of nutritive substances are necessary was set forth by William Prout (1785–1850) in a book published in 1834. He divided the food nutrients into the saccharine group, the oleaginous group, and the albuminous group for which we now use the terms carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Eight years later the great German chemist, von Liebig (1803–1873), published the results of his critical studies in which he showed that these organic foodstuffs
are oxidized in the body.
Liebig’s initiation of modern methods of organic analysis paved the way for extensive work in food analysis and the analysis of urine, feces, and body tissues and thus made possible the investigation of metabolic changes. Liebig recognized the fact that protein contains nitrogen and suggested as early as 1842 that the nitrogen of the urine might be used as a measure of the protein destruction in the body. This method was later demonstrated by Bidder and Schmidt and was established by the German physiologist, Carl Voit (1831–1908).
At the close of the nineteenth century (1895), the American scientist Atwater (1844–1907), who had studied under Voit published a summary on the analyses of foods, emphasizing nutritive ingredients (in terms of carbohydrates, fat, and protein), digestibility, fuel value and the ratios between nutritive values and costs. Atwater considered it poor economy to purchase fruits, fresh vegetables, and eggs since cheaper foods would serve just as well in meeting nutritive needs, according to nutritional concepts of his time. Vitamins and most mineral elements had not been identified prior to 1910; their role in human nutrition was not even suspected. In discussing Atwater’s work, McCollum said, Atwater visualized the coming of a time when farmers should be able to consult tables showing the cost of protein and energy in various crops, and, taking into account digestibility of their food elements, to select the cheapest sources of these nutrients for compounding their rations for feeding animals. Fortunately for his peace of mind he never saw the effects of restricting animals or men to diets which might have been compounded on his advice. Also, it is very fortunate that housewives did not, so far as we are aware, attempt to follow his advice in the feeding of their families.
Of course the early nutritionists, such as Atwater with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Armsby at Pennsylvania State University, and McCollum at Wisconsin State University, were primarily concerned with animals rather than with human beings. They were solving problems of great economic value to the frontier country which was just becoming scientifically oriented in its agriculture and industry at the turn of the century.
Benedict at the Carnegie Institute in Boston and DuBois at the Russel Sage Foundation of Medical Research in New York, in 1910–1920 pursued concern for the importance of human nutrition by analyzing respiratory exchange as related to heat production in healthy, normal persons of different ages and in ill or abnormal persons. Except for modifications proposed by Boothby, Berkson, and Dunn of Mayo Clinic, Benedict’s and DuBois’ data still serve as the reference standard for prediction of basal energy expenditures.
The interest created in nutrition by the work of Atwater, Benedict, and others resulted in many dietary studies on people in different parts of the world who performed different kinds of work and were engaged in varied occupations. The findings in terms of energy as calories and as protein needs were used as a basis for establishing the dietary requirements of the human body.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, nitrogen balance was investigated by Henry Russel Chittenden of Yale University. As a result of his findings in prolonged experiments on different groups of men, he became an advocate of low levels of protein intake as being most conducive to health. Chittenden’s work stimulated further study of the quantitative needs of man. Sherman’s compilation of data from available nitrogen balance studies showed the minimum protein requirement to be close to the level advocated by Chittenden, but Sherman recommended that the daily allowance should provide a margin of safety
which should be 50% above the minimum required for nitrogen equilibrium.
Sherman offered much leadership in the development of the currently emphasized Recommended Dietary Allowance of the Food and Nutrition Committee of the National Research Council. These allowances established in 1941 were expected to be revised at intervals as data from research indicated the need. Revisions have occurred periodically, the most recent being in 1968; a new one to be released in 1973.
The beginning of the twentieth century also saw the initiation of studies on the amino acid composition of proteins in relation to their nutritive value and the significance of individual amino acids in nutrition. Kossel, Fisher, and Osborne were pioneers in protein analysis. Willcock and Hopkins in England and Osborne and Mendel in this country were the first to establish the essential nature of certain amino acids. Their work has been extended with the employment of more highly refined methods by W. C. Rose and others. Shortages of the usual sources of high quality proteins created by World War II and the following years of exploding populations have stimulated renewed interest in foods and protein analysis as well as in all other aspects of nutrition.
Twentieth-century developments have included a greater recognition of the importance of the mineral elements in nutrition and the discovery and gradual elucidation of a large number of heterogeneous substances known as vitamins. The recognition of the chemical activity of vitamins as constituents of enzyme systems has greatly increased knowledge of their functions in metabolism and other chemistry of living tissue.
Areas of investigation which challenge the twentieth-century investigator are the interrelationships among nutrients and the control of nutritional processes. A better understanding of these factors will add other important chapters to the development of the science of nutrition.
The tools of nutrition investigation have closely followed developments in chemistry, biology, microbiology, and physics. An understanding of the chemistry of nutrients and their metabolic products was followed by investigations of the intermediary metabolites which have recently been greatly facilitated by the use of biological tracers in the form of radioactive