The Nature of Nutrition: A Unifying Framework from Animal Adaptation to Human Obesity

by Stephen J. Simpson, David Raubenheimer

Nutrition has long been considered more the domain of medicine and agriculture than of the biological sciences, yet it touches and shapes all aspects of the natural world. The need for nutrients determines whether wild animals thrive, how populations evolve and decline, and how ecological communities are structured. "The Nature of Nutrition" is the first book to address nutrition's enormously complex role in biology, both at the level of individual organisms and in their broader ecological interactions.

Stephen Simpson and David Raubenheimer provide a comprehensive theoretical approach to the analysis of nutrition--the Geometric Framework. They show how it can help us to understand the links between nutrition and the biology of individual animals, including the physiological mechanisms that determine the nutritional interactions of the animal with its environment, and the consequences of these interactions in terms of health, immune responses, and lifespan. Simpson and Raubenheimer explain how these effects translate into the collective behavior of groups and societies, and in turn influence food webs and the structure of ecosystems. Then they demonstrate how the Geometric Framework can be used to tackle issues in applied nutrition, such as the problem of optimizing diets for livestock and endangered species, and how it can also help to address the epidemic of human obesity and metabolic disease

Drawing on a wealth of examples from slime molds to humans, "The Nature of Nutrition" has important applications in ecology, evolution, and physiology, and offers promising solutions for human health, conservation, and agriculture.

Genres: Nutrition

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Alexa Duchesneau · Rating 5 out of 5]

I (read this book for my research, so I wouldn’t recommend anyone else read it HOWEVER it was super important for me!

[RuBisCO Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's about research but folks should read this instead of diet trend books.

[DAN GAFFNEY · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book by Stephen J. Simpson and David Raubenheimer
is a revelation. Based on a vast wealth of research it explains how and why animals, including humans, are biologically driven to consume protein, no matter what.

While animals don’t experience obesity, humans do because our nutritional environment has changed radically (in the past 10,000 years) towards an overabundance of readily available carbohydrates and fats. This has altered the ratio of protein to carbohydrates and fats in our diet in ways that make it harder to consume protein’s ideal contribution to energy intake (15 per cent).

Eating a Western diet effectively starves humans of necessary protein and in an effort to maintain or ‘defend’ our biologically driven protein target, we are over-consuming carbohydrates and fats, thereby increasing their contribution to our energy needs. The result is that we are consuming and storing the excess energy from these energy dense food sources, resulting in overweight and obesity.

At the same time, humans have become more sedentary, meaning that we’re expending less energy than we used to and depriving ourselves of the ability to expend our higher energy intake and excess weight. Being overweight or obese also triggers insulin resistance and a cascade of other pathological conditions resulting in metabolic syndrome and a heightened risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The evidence suggest that we need to listen to our biology and rebalance our diet towards a higher protein intake, thereby reducing the contribution of carbohydrates and fats to our energy requirements. Obviously, increasing our physical activity levels will help too :)