Nutrition in Clinical Practice

Abstract: A book for medical students, residents, physicians, and other health profession students and practitioners who have not taken formal nutrition courses provides information on a wide range of basic and applied topics demonstrating the importance of nutrition in disease prevention and treatment. The text provides a rigorous scientific approach to the use of diet therapy, discusses key and sometimes controversial issues, and presents guidelines for patient care. The 56 text chapters are grouped among 6 specific areas: the basic characteristics and principles of nutrients and dietary recommendations; nutritional physiology (including digestion, absorption, metabolism, starvation, immunity, and illness-induced malnutrition); nutritional assessment and support strategies (including enteral and parenteral feeding); nutritional assessment and support in pregnancy, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and the elderly; the nutritional aspects of a wide variety of specific diseases; and various interactions between diet and lifestyle (including exercise, food additives, contaminants, and toxins, supplements, vegetarian diets, and nutrition policy and politics).