Aryana Libris

Author : Campbell T. Colin
Title : Whole Rethinking the science of nutrition
Year : 2013

Link download : Campbell_T_Colin_-_Whole_Rethinking_the_science_of_nutrition.zip

Introduction. n 1965, my academic career looked promising. After four years as a research associate at MIT, I was settling into my new office at Virginia Tech’s Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition. Finally, I was a real professor! My research agenda couldn’t have been more noble: end childhood malnutrition in poor countries by figuring out how to get more high-quality protein into their diets. My arena was the Philippines, thanks to a generous grant from the U.S. State Department’s Agency for International Development. The first challenge was to find a locally produced, inexpensive protein source. (Even though malnutrition is largely an issue of not getting enough calories overall, in the mid- 1960s we thought that calories from protein were somehow special.) The second challenge was to develop a series of self-help centers around the country where we could show mothers how to raise their children out of malnutrition by using that protein source. My team and I chose peanuts, which are rich in protein and can grow under lots of different conditions. At the same time, I was working on another project at the request of my department chair, Dean Charlie Engel. Charlie had secured U.S. Department of Agriculture funding to study aflatoxin, a cancer-causing chemical produced by a fungus Aspergillus flavus, and my job was to learn all I could about how the fungus grew so we could prevent it from growing on various food sources. This was clearly an important project, as there was quite a bit of evidence that Aspergillus flavus caused liver cancer in lab rats (the mainstream assumption was, and still is to this day, that anything that causes cancer in rats or mice probably also causes cancer in humans). One of the main foods Aspergillus flavus contaminates is peanuts, and so, in one of those cosmic coincidences that appears amazing only years later, I found myself studying peanuts in two completely different contexts simultaneously. ...