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Book Review |
Department of Human Nutrition and Food Science
California State Polytechnic University and Department of Molecular Medicine
City of Hope National Medical Center &
Beckman Research Institute
Pomona, California
Adrianne Bendich and Richard J. Deckelbaum, eds. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 2001.
The use of nutrition as a medical therapy emerged in the last several hundred years to become both fact and fad of modern life. Improper nutritional status may be the last factor to which a disease state is attributed in the setting of plentiful and varied food supplies. Both over- and under-nutrition are treatable with dietary intervention, although the desired response to over-nutrition is vastly more difficult to evoke by managing diet alone. Much of the available information about nutrition is absorbed from questionable resources—word of mouth, popular media, the Internet—and makes outlandish performance claims for correcting the ills of modern life. Both health practitioners and their patients are equally susceptible to spurious health claims for nutritional supplements.
Despite the continuing need for quick and accurate diagnosis and treatment of nutritionally-derived diseases, many health professionals lack appropriate exposure to the sound information about nutritional therapies that is contained within this comprehensive volume edited by Bendich and Deckelbaum. Primary and Secondary Preventive Nutrition should be required reading for researchers, faculty and students in the healing professions.
The editors have done a first-rate job in amassing and coherently presenting a comprehensive collection of chapters on nutritional management and prevention of cancer, metabolic diseases and bone diseases. The book is constructed with good logical flow, but it also excels as a reference text. Although many chapters are closely related, they complement each other nicely rather than overlapping significantly. The information is densely packed, but also reads well, putting the text within the grasp of student and teacher, novice and experienced researcher.
The issues of micronutrient supplementation and cancer risk are well covered in two separate chapters. The first summarizes the current data on the efficacy and drawbacks of supplementation, while the second gives insight into the mechanisms by which micronutrients may regulate cell proliferation and development. A third chapter focuses on the role of soy products in prevention of cancer. Future editions would benefit from the addition of a fourth chapter covering non-soy phytochemicals that may play critical anticancer roles.
The metabolic syndrome, a constellation of findings including insulin resistance, central obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, has reached epidemic proportions according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (JAMA 287:356–359, 2002). An estimated 47 million Americans are affected, and the economic toll is greater than $100 billion annually. The metabolic syndrome can be managed by restoring normal energy balance. Nearly half of this text is devoted to addressing the critical role of nutrition in preventing and managing this obesity-related syndrome.
Information on the role of nutrition in growth and development comprises a somewhat scant two chapters. What is truly lacking from this coverage is the gene-environment interaction. There are now many known nuclear receptors involved in gene expression during growth, differentiation and development whose ligands are derived from the diet. For example, the long chain polyunsaturated fats (PUFA) that are discussed in the context of infant growth and development may be important endogenous and exogenous activators of several nuclear receptors involved in energy homeostasis. Even the chapters on bone diseases would benefit from a brief discussion of the regulation of gene expression by dietary factors such as PUFA.
Primary and Secondary Preventive Nutrition brings together current opinion on the application of nutritional therapy to a wide variety of diseases into one concise, meaty reference. This book is intended for a broad audience, including researchers, health care professionals, and students. The editors have managed to make it a good fit for all—understandable to the novice, yet sufficiently detailed as to provide a wealth of information for the more technically savvy reader. This handy volume, now part of the foundation of the present reviewer’s personal nutrition library, would serve equally well as either a reference or course text.
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