TY - CHAP M1 - Book, Section TI - Nutritional Epidemiology A1 - Hebert, James R. A2 - Boulton, Matthew L. A2 - Wallace, Robert B. Y1 - 2022 N1 - T2 - Maxcy-Rosenau-Last Public Health & Preventive Medicine, 16e AB - Eating food is something that most people do every day of their lives. Indeed, to go for too long without food will lead to disability, disease and, ultimately, death. Therefore, it should not be surprising that cultures throughout history have sought to understand the role of dietary exposures (i.e., the foods we eat) in determining health and well-being. Interest in understanding the role of diet in health extends back millennia in the Greek, Ayurvedic, and Chinese traditional medicine systems1–5; that is, long before scientific medicine, as we know it, came to the West. It is interesting to note that in the modern (post-Medieval) Western tradition the first clinical trial, conducted by Lind in the middle of the eighteenth century,6 focused on a dietary factor (i.e., ascorbic acid-rich limes for the prevention and treatment of scurvy among sailors on long journeys). That work preceded by a century that of John Snow,7 who showed that cholera was spread by contaminated water (and even that is a nutritional exposure of sorts!) and is widely credited to be the father of modern epidemiology. SN - PB - McGraw Hill CY - New York, NY Y2 - 2024/04/18 UR - accessmedicine.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1182670816 ER -