ABSTRACT
Nutrition played a prominent role in the education and practice of physicians from the time of Hippocrates until the mid-twentieth century. Hippocrates, for example, is noted for one of his aphorisms: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food” [1]. For much of human history, undernutrition was a major cause of death, both directly through starvation and indirectly by its amplification of susceptibility to and mortality from disease, especially infectious diseases. Until the period just after World War II, most American medical schools included separate, year-long courses on nutrition in their curriculum. However, with the explosion in knowledge in biochemistry and molecular biology, coupled with the apparent triumph of antibiotics and public health laws 2over infectious diseases, nutrition was seen as less and less important and lost its place in the medical school curriculum. By the 1980s, most schools had either limited their students’ nutrition exposure to a few weeks in the first year, or blended nutrition lectures into biochemistry and physiology, eliminating it altogether as a perceived specialty in the minds of most students.
