What is clinical nutrition?
Clinical nutrition is a field that developed in the 1940s to treat individuals with specific nutritional deficiency diseases, like scurvy and pellagra. By the 1960s, however, experts were beginning to recognize that certain doses of nutrients had the power to prevent illness. Today, researchers and scientists continue to uncover the therapeutic role of individual nutrients in the prevention and treatment of disease. For example, antioxidants like beta-carotene, selenium, vitamin E, and vitamin C have been shown to protect against the development of heart disease, cancer, and other chronic degenerative diseases. The field of clinical nutrition has evolved into a practice that is increasingly incorporated into mainstream medical treatment.
Clinical nutrition is a cornerstone of Naturopathic Medicine. It refers to both the practice of using food to maintain health and the therapeutic use of food to treat illness. Scientific research has shown that many medical conditions can be treated as effectively with food and nutritional supplements as they can by other means, but with fewer complications and side effects.
Related Questions
- Working as a clinical nutrition epidemiologist, you have seen the rise in obesity grow to epidemic proportions. What type of NCCO public education programs are you planning to address this?
- Can measured resting energy expenditure be estimated by formulae in daily clinical nutrition practice?
- What exactly is designed clinical nutrition? How is it personalized?
