history of food and nutrition
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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.
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.