Nutritional Health: Strategies for Disease Prevention, Ted Wilson and Norman J. Temple, editors. 2001, 333 pages, hardcover, $ 69.50.
Nutritional Health: Strategies for Disease Prevention is an absorbing fount of cutting-edge nutritional knowledge, which very capably illumines an array of flash points of timely nutritional interest. Although the volume proffers a cascade of dietary recommendations and advice, it makes it manifestly plain that nutrition is a highly complex scientific world of preliminary evidence, in-progress clinical trials, unproven hypotheses, suggestive evidence, and tentative conclusions. With this important caveat in mind, the book can be used appropriately as a sort of vade mecum for the effectual use of nutritional knowledge as an invaluable ally in combating chronic diseases.
In structure, Nutritional Health: Strategies for Disease Prevention is composed of succinct scientific review articles crafted by several dozen contributors, including many from outside the United States. The articles are divided into 20 chapters, which broadly overview selected nutrition and health-related topics and, individually and collectively, epitomize how good nutrition can, in a sense, be the key that unlocks the door to optimal, or at least better, health.
Selected topics pertaining to health and nutrition are reviewed by means of relatively pithy examinations of relevant data, including data drawn from human, animal, in vitro, prospective, case-control, and cohort studies. Clinical, epidemiological, and experimental data are all part of the book's rich mix of scholarship. Most chapters employ a didactic, academic, abstruse style of writing. The volume's very capable synthesis of the extant body of nutritional-related data adumbrates, particularly, topics including calcium, sodium, soy isoflavones, antioxidants, homocysteine, omega-3 fatty acids, herbs, biotechnology, hypertension, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. There is also a chapter of practical information on the use of the Internet to glean nutritional-related knowledge. A concluding, forward-looking chapter identifies pocket areas that may constitute key challenges to nutritional science in coming years. The volume is tilted toward a research, rather than clinical, orientation. And in this regard, the copious lists of references may be a real boon to the research-minded reader. Additionally, numerous instructive tables and figures populate the volume. Overall, this volume is characterized by well-written reviews concerning timely nutrition-related topics, although it has limitations and is not impervious to criticism.
The range of topics covered is, necessarily, selective in nature and limited. And the reviews comprising individual chapters are relatively narrow in scope, rather than comprehensive. The scientifically unsophisticated reader may unwittingly, and erroneously, generalize the reviewed data. At least a rudimentary background in epidemiology and biostatistics would be helpful to the prospective reader. Serious students of nutrition and health need to read the underlying references rather than simply reading the reviews. Moreover, prospective readers must be mindful that the body of scientific literature relevant to nutrition and health continues to evolve daily.
An overarching message conveyed by this volume is that in the realm of nutrition and health there are vast complexities involved in elucidating mechanisms, establishing definite associations, and, ultimately, making firm diet-health recommendations. There are important, and numerous, gaps in scientific knowledge regarding diet and disease. And many questions remain to be answered. The need for further well-designed, large-scale clinical trials cannot be gainsaid. Importantly, students of nutrition will have to continue to work hard to stay up-to-date. Reading this book is a step in that direction. For researchers, epidemiologists, clinicians, public health professionals, students in the health sciences, health policy makers, and others with a serious interest in the diet-health connection, the book is recommended strongly.