Question

history of food and nutrition

Answer 1

Answer:

The history of the study of food as medicine reveals centuries of discovery and development of nutrition careers.

Although modern science and the latest discoveries in biology, medicine, and health inform today’s field of nutrition and diet, people have been investigating the very real link between food and health for much longer than you may think.

Food and the History of Healing Through Nutrition

In 400 B.C. the Greek physician Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine” said, “Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.” Hippocrates realized that food impacts a person’s health, body and mind to help prevent illness as well as maintain wellness.

In Hippocrates’ Greece, as well as across pre-modern Europe and Asia since ancient times, foods were used to affect health. For instance, the juice of liver was squeezed on the eye to treat eye diseases, connected to Vitamin A deficiency. Garlic was used to cure athlete’s foot, and eating ginger was thought to stimulate the metabolism.

In 1747, a British Navy physician, Dr. James Lind, saw that sailors were developing scurvy, a deadly bleeding disorder, on long voyages. He observed that they ate only nonperishable foods such as bread and meat.

Lind’s experiment fed one group of sailors salt water, one group vinegar, and one group limes. Those given limes didn’t develop scurvy. And although Vitamin C wasn’t discovered until the 1930s, this experiment changed the way physicians thought about food, creating a market for nutrition careers.

Answer 2

Until about 170 years ago

there was little scientific

knowledge in the West

about nutrition. The

founder of modern

science of nutrition was

Frenchman named

Lavoisier (1743 to

1793)whose

contribution paved new ways to nutrition

research. In the year 1752 James Lind’s

discovered “Scurvy” which could be cured or

prevented by eating fresh fruits and

vegetables. In 1952 it was known that diseases

could be cured by eating certain kinds of

foods. In 19th century it was known that the

body obtains three substances namely

proteins, fats and carbohydrates from the

food.