Nutrition: Maintaining and Improving Health

Following the tradition of its predecessor, the fifth edition of Nutrition: Maintaining and Improving Health continues to offer a wide-ranging coverage of all aspects of nutrition while providing new information to this edition including:

• Increased coverage of experimental and observational methods used in nutrition
• In-depth focus on the nutritional implications of the increased adoption of vegetarian and vegan lifestyles
• Streamlined referencing - a short selected list of key references at the end of each chapter with URL links to free additional resources where possible
• Discussion of nutrition debates
• Critical coverage of "medicinal uses of food" including superfoods, functional foods and dietary supplements
• Updated bullet point summaries of key points after each major topic within each chapter

The author provides an evidence-based evaluation of many key nutrition beliefs and philosophies. The book contains in-depth and critical reviews of the methods used to evaluate nutritional intakes/status and the observational and experimental used to investigate putative links between dietary factors and health outcome. It covers the role of food as a source of energy and nutrients while discussing the non-nutritional roles of food and the social and psychological factors that influence food choice. Presenting a critical discussion on the value of nutrition research linking specific foods or nutrients to specific diseases which encourages students to question the value of some current nutrition research.

This is essential reading for all nutrition and dietetics students with different backgrounds who are studying nutrition as a specific discipline for the first time.

Geoffrey P. Webb holds a BSc degree in physiology and biochemistry, a PhD from the University of Southampton and an MSc (distinction and Yudkin prize) in Nutrition from King’s College, London. He became a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2014. In the early part of his career, he performed bench research on vitamin D, obesity and diabetes. He led an obesity research group in the 1980s and published data which seriously challenged the then fashionable notion that a defect in heat generation (thermogenesis) by brown fat might be an important cause of obesity. He spent most of his academic career at the University of East London and was a visiting professor at the University of North Florida in 1992 and spent a year’s study leave at King’s College London (1986-7).He has a wide expertise across nutrition and the other medical and biological sciences and considerable experience of writing and presenting to audiences ranging from academic scientists through students to the general newspaper-reading public. Since the late 1980s, he focused his scholarly efforts on writing books, book chapters and review articles. Several of his articles and reviews have related to discussion of major scientific errors or critical discussion of the research methods used by biomedical/nutritional scientists including epidemiology and the use of animal models. He published four books which have all been delivered to agreed deadlines and have so far yielded nine editions plus some translations into Spanish and one into Polish. He wrote a monthly "nutrition and health" column for a local East London newspaper, the Newham Recorder, for three years. He was on the editorial board of the British Journal of Nutrition for about eight years. He wrote a couple of articles for the online magazine/newspaper The Conversation. He maintains an active blog for several years and published pieces here about aspects of nutrition, health, the biomedical research process, major scientific errors and research fraud.