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Advanced Human Nutrition [with Access Code]
Written for the upper-level undergrad or graduate level majors course, Advanced Human Nutrition, Third Edition provides an in-depth overview of the human body and details why nutrients are important from a biochemical, physiological, and molecular perspective. Through its writing style and numerous figures and illustrations, the Third Edition clearly outlines metabolism and the molecular functions of nutrients. A variety of pedagogical elements within the text, such as "Here's Where You Have Been" and "Here's Where You Are Going," help clarify key points from the chapter and provide real-world examples that bring the content to life.
New and Key Features of the Third Edition:
-Includes new chapters on Fiber and Nutraceuricals and Functional Foods
-"Before You Go On" sections asks students to reflect upon what they've just read, urging them to go back and re-read portions of the text if they do not readily grasp the material.
-"Special Feature" boxes on focused topics add depth to the chapter and, in some cases, allow the student to view the application of basic science.
-The end-of-chapter summary reiterates key points from the chapter and helps students prepare for future exams.
New and Key Features of the Third Edition:
-Includes new chapters on Fiber and Nutraceuricals and Functional Foods
-"Before You Go On" sections asks students to reflect upon what they've just read, urging them to go back and re-read portions of the text if they do not readily grasp the material.
-"Special Feature" boxes on focused topics add depth to the chapter and, in some cases, allow the student to view the application of basic science.
-The end-of-chapter summary reiterates key points from the chapter and helps students prepare for future exams.
- GenresScience
440 pages, Paperback
First published August 23, 1999
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68 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 16, 2013
Nutrition is tasked with answering the age-old question: what are the characteristics of a healthy diet? This is a rather complex problem. It involves tremendous individual variation due to gene interactions and life history. It requires a thorough grasp of metabolic pathways and the roles chemicals play in the body, how they move around, and how the body compensates for changes in their intake. It is tasked with sorting through an enormous bevy of phytochemicals only recently recognized as important. The techniques we have to go about answer the question are further limiting. Conducting a controlled experiment with sufficient replication is almost impossible given variations in individual diet and lifestyle. More invasive and direct experiments are generally unethical and/or impractical. On top of all that, the subject is further confounded by the role of corporate money in funding and thus guiding research agendas, influencing public agency recommendations, and marketing products that are cheap to produce or earn a premium as "healthy."
I was inspired to get a scientist's-eye-view of the nutrition question by my interest in food chemistry and physiology, by my own issues with wheat and possibly other things, and most of all by the desire to be an educated voice on the perennial debates that come up in our house. The nature of our diet at Greenfire is mostly dictated by preference and environmental/ethical concerns, but our community focuses so much on our food that food fads come and go all the time. We've had raw food diets, purges and cleanses, veganism, the primal diet, dairy and gluten free eaters, plenty of vegetarians, a few fish allergies, people who love tofu and hate butter, others who love butter and hate soy products, and a few sugar addicts (myself chief among them). This is all, from what I understand, a product of the human compulsion to load food choices with a significance, culturally and medicinally, that is found in few other issues, a way to deal with the immense burden of choice omnivory imposes.
For all those reasons and more, I buckled down and read this nutrition textbook cover to cover in ten days. This was a very useful exercise, though it ended up being somewhat unsatisfying on the recommendations end and gave a somewhat poor account of the history of research in the area. The book overwhelmingly describes physiology, biochemistry, and metabolic pathways at the expense of broader issues. This reflects the state of knowledge: biochemistry and physiology have been researched thoroughly for a century and this research has yielded insights that provide the groundwork for understanding more complex issues. It was occasionally a bit tedious, though I felt like I could have grasped most of it if I'd spent the time. I skipped the list sections and the extensive naming of enzymes in digestive pathways, knowing I can come back if I have more specific questions.
The occasional tedium is punctuated by a series of wonderful revelations about physiology and food chemistry, and I really enjoyed the first part of the book for that reason. I learned
Further, I know in some detail why various conventional wisdom dietary chestnuts are suggested.
Given the support throughout for these rather mainstream dietary conventional wisdoms, I was somewhat surprised when they ended the book by suggesting that the “paleolithic diet probably provides a template for modern dietary design.” I was hoping to take the lessons I'd learned here and apply them to the paleo diet, as well as the recommendations I'll find in Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (which I get the impression fall more on the Weston Price Foundation side than the paleo, but that might be wrong).
But the authors have done that for me, suggesting that the paleo diet provides high fiber, low phytate (a compound that chelates minerals and prevents their uptake), lean meat with great unsaturated fat contents, a low glycemic index, and a rich source of phytochemicals, nutrients, and minerals well above the standard American diet. They cast doubt on research suggesting high protein diets are linked to heart disease and some cancers, pointing out that saturated fat acts as a lurking variable with known causal links to those issues. That's exciting, because the paleo diet model is much easier to produce sustainably than vegetarian diets are.
Since the emphasis is squarely on the known biochemistry and physiology, the recommendations throughout the book are always offered with a grain of salt (sylvite, preferably!), and it seems a lot of them have been thrown into doubt by research since the publishing date. The saturated fat issue particularly has come into question, as research has dismantled the connection between them and heart disease. A lot of research, specifically, that seems to throw its weight behind the fat- and protein-loving, simple carb hating conventional wisdom research from the past few decades.
Questions I still have: why does glycogen break down/disappear, leaving meat a poor source of starch? Where does it go? What's up with fructose - is it as bad for you as Robert Lustig would have you believe? Am I really consuming an unhealthy amount of sugar? What's the deal with dietary antioxidants?
Most interestingly, what is the relationship between fats consumed and fats stored? I've heard it argued that fat storage comes from carbohydrates, not fats, that excess fats consumed are flushed out in urine; that energy intake is what determines fat storage, and ratio of carbs to fats as a source is irrelevant; that PUFAs decrease fat storage. What's up here?
Edit: I've spent the rest of the day reading various more modern diet sources - the Vegetarian Myth, MarksDailyApple.com, and this guy: http://authoritynutrition.com/11-bigg.... It's quickly become apparent that Medeiros overlooked a lot of interesting and important debates in nutrition science - the controversy over the lipid hypothesis v. the carbohydrate hypothesis, which was actively debated for decades before the book was published. In hindsight it's clear they did not thoroughly cover the debate in actual diet recommendations, in favor of focusing heavily on the known biochem and physiology. It's fine to focus on the known and elide the unknown, but they presented one side of the debate without making it clear there was a strong opposition to it, which is shameful.
There a host of other interesting issues I wish they'd covered, but which may be more recent topics of research, so I'll give them a pass there - lectins, phytates and other anti-nutrients, soy hormone mimics, inflammation and the possible negative side of effects of PUFAs (which are constantly touted in the book), the chemical role of cooking in digestion, etc.
I was inspired to get a scientist's-eye-view of the nutrition question by my interest in food chemistry and physiology, by my own issues with wheat and possibly other things, and most of all by the desire to be an educated voice on the perennial debates that come up in our house. The nature of our diet at Greenfire is mostly dictated by preference and environmental/ethical concerns, but our community focuses so much on our food that food fads come and go all the time. We've had raw food diets, purges and cleanses, veganism, the primal diet, dairy and gluten free eaters, plenty of vegetarians, a few fish allergies, people who love tofu and hate butter, others who love butter and hate soy products, and a few sugar addicts (myself chief among them). This is all, from what I understand, a product of the human compulsion to load food choices with a significance, culturally and medicinally, that is found in few other issues, a way to deal with the immense burden of choice omnivory imposes.
For all those reasons and more, I buckled down and read this nutrition textbook cover to cover in ten days. This was a very useful exercise, though it ended up being somewhat unsatisfying on the recommendations end and gave a somewhat poor account of the history of research in the area. The book overwhelmingly describes physiology, biochemistry, and metabolic pathways at the expense of broader issues. This reflects the state of knowledge: biochemistry and physiology have been researched thoroughly for a century and this research has yielded insights that provide the groundwork for understanding more complex issues. It was occasionally a bit tedious, though I felt like I could have grasped most of it if I'd spent the time. I skipped the list sections and the extensive naming of enzymes in digestive pathways, knowing I can come back if I have more specific questions.
The occasional tedium is punctuated by a series of wonderful revelations about physiology and food chemistry, and I really enjoyed the first part of the book for that reason. I learned
Further, I know in some detail why various conventional wisdom dietary chestnuts are suggested.
Given the support throughout for these rather mainstream dietary conventional wisdoms, I was somewhat surprised when they ended the book by suggesting that the “paleolithic diet probably provides a template for modern dietary design.” I was hoping to take the lessons I'd learned here and apply them to the paleo diet, as well as the recommendations I'll find in Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (which I get the impression fall more on the Weston Price Foundation side than the paleo, but that might be wrong).
But the authors have done that for me, suggesting that the paleo diet provides high fiber, low phytate (a compound that chelates minerals and prevents their uptake), lean meat with great unsaturated fat contents, a low glycemic index, and a rich source of phytochemicals, nutrients, and minerals well above the standard American diet. They cast doubt on research suggesting high protein diets are linked to heart disease and some cancers, pointing out that saturated fat acts as a lurking variable with known causal links to those issues. That's exciting, because the paleo diet model is much easier to produce sustainably than vegetarian diets are.
Since the emphasis is squarely on the known biochemistry and physiology, the recommendations throughout the book are always offered with a grain of salt (sylvite, preferably!), and it seems a lot of them have been thrown into doubt by research since the publishing date. The saturated fat issue particularly has come into question, as research has dismantled the connection between them and heart disease. A lot of research, specifically, that seems to throw its weight behind the fat- and protein-loving, simple carb hating conventional wisdom research from the past few decades.
Questions I still have: why does glycogen break down/disappear, leaving meat a poor source of starch? Where does it go? What's up with fructose - is it as bad for you as Robert Lustig would have you believe? Am I really consuming an unhealthy amount of sugar? What's the deal with dietary antioxidants?
Most interestingly, what is the relationship between fats consumed and fats stored? I've heard it argued that fat storage comes from carbohydrates, not fats, that excess fats consumed are flushed out in urine; that energy intake is what determines fat storage, and ratio of carbs to fats as a source is irrelevant; that PUFAs decrease fat storage. What's up here?
Edit: I've spent the rest of the day reading various more modern diet sources - the Vegetarian Myth, MarksDailyApple.com, and this guy: http://authoritynutrition.com/11-bigg.... It's quickly become apparent that Medeiros overlooked a lot of interesting and important debates in nutrition science - the controversy over the lipid hypothesis v. the carbohydrate hypothesis, which was actively debated for decades before the book was published. In hindsight it's clear they did not thoroughly cover the debate in actual diet recommendations, in favor of focusing heavily on the known biochem and physiology. It's fine to focus on the known and elide the unknown, but they presented one side of the debate without making it clear there was a strong opposition to it, which is shameful.
There a host of other interesting issues I wish they'd covered, but which may be more recent topics of research, so I'll give them a pass there - lectins, phytates and other anti-nutrients, soy hormone mimics, inflammation and the possible negative side of effects of PUFAs (which are constantly touted in the book), the chemical role of cooking in digestion, etc.
July 22, 2024
Great study on human biological and Molecular nutrition.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews