Preventive Nutrition: The Comprehensive Guide for Health Professionals, Second Edition, Adrianne Bendich and Richard J. Deckelbaum, editors. 2001, 503 pages, hardcover, $ 99.50.
Preventive Nutrition: The Comprehensive Guide for Health Professionals, second edition, is a solid bedrock of nutritional scholarship, targeted particularly to health professionals, including physicians, nutritionists, dentists, pharmacists, dietitians, policy makers, health educators, and investigators. Its overarching goal is to describe the most recent nutritional approaches for promoting health and preventing disease, with increasing recognition of the role of nutrition in health promotion and disease risk prevention. The volume is a sort of intellectual bridge, connecting nutritional research findings with clinical and public health recommendations. The several dozen luminaries who contributed to the volume cuts to the core of the vast expanse of clinical, epidemiological, and experimental data pertaining to diet and health, reviewing adroitly the extant body of nutritional data, and offers practical clinical guidance and sensible public health recommendations. This scientifically authoritative, timely, and up-to-date resource is a highly valuable contribution to the ongoing, thorny debate regarding diet and disease. The contributors to the volume-some of whom are from outside the United States-include researchers, epidemiologists, public health officials, clinicians, and nutritionists. The lengthy, probing tentacles of their intellectual curiosity and energy extend to a considerable multitude of nutrition-related topics of timely interest. Research findings, gleaned from the global body of nutritional data, are placed under the microscope of expert scientific scrutiny. The reviewed data are culled from clinical and intervention trials and from animal, experimental, epidemiological, population-based, retrospective, prospective, case-control, and cohort studies.
The volume is composed of 21 chapters, divided into six parts. The chapters are written in a dry, academic style and generally provide a brief overview of some nutrition-related topic, a relatively pithy epitome of selected research data germane to that topic, and succinct recommendations, based on the synthesis of the reviewed data. A limitation of a book of this nature is that some issues will be beyond the scope of the review, since it is not possible to discuss all topics of possible nutritional interest. This particular volume has an especially solid mooring in cancer and cardiovascular disease. Cutting-edge developments in nutrition relating to childhood cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer, and upper gastrointestinal tract cancer are examined, as are cardiovascular disease-related topics, encompassing omega-3 fatty acids, homocysteine, folic acid, iron, and dietary fat. Attention is also focused on other possible nutrition-disease linkages, including osteoporosis and age-related macular degeneration.
One part draws readers' attention to possible linkages between nutrition and teratology, DNA damage to sperm, and optimal neurodevelopment. Another part focuses on global preventive nutrition strategies. Salutary features of the volume include multitudinous research references and numerous tables and figures of overall excellent quality. An annotated listing of Web sites of nutritional interest is also included, along with a list of books related to preventive nutrition. This comprehensive volume amounts to a quite impressive amalgamation of the science and practice of nutrition. This volume makes the point that many debilitating, chronic diseases can be prevented, or at least delayed, with relatively facile nutritional interventions.
The nutritional guidelines spelled out may potentially mitigate individual morbidity and, in a more macro sense, contribute to the global debate regarding health care. The volume may be an impetus for public health initiatives, and further, it makes many well-reasoned recommendations regarding future research studies. In the latter vein, the volume makes it manifestly clear that extensive additional research is needed to flesh out the bones of nutritional science and also to elucidate pertinent biologic mechanisms. Moreover, the volume makes plain the paramount importance for students of nutrition to stay abreast of new developments in the field of nutrition research. Although this very commendable volume is probably too esoteric for persons lacking some academic background in nutrition science and epidemiology, it is heartily recommended to all others wishing to educate themselves about nutrition and health.