The Modern Nutritional Diseases

Millions of people have been using the low-fat, low-cholesterol, high-carbohydrate diet that has been promoted in the mass media for last half-century for prevention of heart disease and stroke. During this same period, the numbers of new cases of heart disease and stroke have not decreased as promised, but increased, and type-2 diabetes and obesity, which were uncommon 50 years ago, have grown to become major epidemics. In this book, heart disease, stroke, type-2 diabetes, obesity, and cancer are among the numerous chronic diseases appropriately termed modern nutritional diseases because scientific studies and biochemical facts clearly point to the modern American diet as a major underlying cause. The heart-healthy diet is based on faulty science ? it is sugar and starch, not saturated fat and cholesterol, that are responsible for high blood cholesterol, type-2 diabetes, and obesity. This book describes how the American diet has changed since the advent of farming and, in modern times, with advances in food technology. It presents evidence to show how these changes are implicated not only in causation of the modern nutritional diseases but also in other growing disease problems such as Alzheimer's disease, osteoporosis, senile dementia, and depression. Caring for one's health has become hopelessly difficult because the mass media, driven by advertising revenues, is the single most important source of health information for most Americans. The book is divided into three parts. The first part defines the problem. The second part provides the science that documents the cause/effect relationship between the modern American diet and the current epidemics of chronic inflammatory diseases. The third part describes dietary modifications that constitute a primary prevention program that can reduce the risk of the modern nutritional diseases and, at the same time, improve one's health and well-being. Alice and Fred Ottoboni, are both public health scientists who, prior to retirement, had worked for many years investigating and preventing diseases in population groups. Over these years they learned that diseases do not ?just happen.? Every disease has a cause, and once the cause is known, prevention is often a very reasonable and proper next step. Alice Ottoboni earned a B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Texas, Austin, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Biochemistry from the University of California, Davis. Her professional career focused on nutritional biochemistry and the toxicity of food contaminants and additives. She is the author of The Dose Makes the Poison, a plain-language guide to toxicology for lay people, first published in 1984. The third edition, coauthored with Patricia Frank, Ph.D., is published by John Wiley and Sons. Fred Ottoboni earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University and a Masters Degree in Public Health and Ph.D. in Environmental Health Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. His primary professional interest was the prevention of occupational diseases. He is the author of Korea Between the Wars: A Soldier's Story,

Originally published in 1985, and authored by an epidemiologists, a medical immunologist, a chemist and a clinical psychologist, this books shows that unravelling the links between diet and disease is a very complex task, and while the evidence is strong in many cases, in others if is of doubtful validity. Many of the diseases prevalent in developed countries are discussed here: cancer, arterial heart disease, food allergies and intolerances as well as the impact of diet on mental health.

This widely acclaimed book is a complete, authoritative reference on nutrition and its role in contemporary medicine, dietetics, nursing, public health, and public policy. Distinguished international experts provide in-depth information on historical landmarks in nutrition, specific dietary components, nutrition in integrated biologic systems, nutritional assessment through the life cycle, nutrition in various clinical disorders, and public health and policy issues. Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease, Eleventh Edition, offers coverage of nutrition's role in disease prevention, international nutrition issues, public health concerns, the role of obesity in a variety of chronic illnesses, genetics as it applies to nutrition, and areas of major scientific progress relating nutrition to disease.

Abstract: The evolution of basic nutrition concepts, from Greco-Roman times to the present, is examined for professional nutritionists, and those interested in the history of civilization. Biographical sketches are presented of some of the great contributors to scientific nutrition knowledge, including Aristotle, Galen, Lavoisier, Mendel, and Funk (who first propounded the theory of "vitamines"); their observations and experiments form the basis for chronologically tracing advances in nutrition research. The history is divided into 2 areas of knowledge; the first section focuses on the concepts of nourishment and energy--the transformation and assimilation of food by the body, innate body heat, the functions of metabolism and respiration, etc. The second section discusses the growth of knowledge about nutritional diseases, including scurvy, beriberi, xerophthalmia, endemic goiter and anemia. (cj).

Nutrition is an essential part of life. It affects our health and can be applied in the prevention and treatment of disease. Substantial interventions in dietary intake and lifestyle changes have been demonstrated to cause significant decrease in disease risk in in the general population and also in patients suffering from various diseases. Traditional plant-based diets and medicines have received much attention as an alternative to modern science-based drugs, while recent technology development in bioinformatics, genomics, and proteomics has provided a better understanding of plant-based drugs, improved quality assurance and allowed the acceleration of clinical trials to bridge the gap with Western medicine. Moreover, research in nutrigenomics and epigenomics has further enhanced the knowledge of the association between nutrition and disease. The book deals with the concerns of the future well-being of our planet, the health of the global human population related to the worldwide obesity epidemic, the issues related to sustainable food production, and the need for a switch to a healthier, more plant-based diet.