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Book Review: Diet, Nutrition & the Prevention of Chronic Diseases

This book is a report on a symposium held in 1988. The references include 1988. It consists of 14 chapters. Many of these were of particular interest. Professor Waterlow's "Mechanisms of Adaptation to Low Energy Intakes" opens the book very well. It provided a fascinating description of what seems to have been found and the possible mechanisms involved. Clearly there is a lot more work to be done in this and a recent paper in Clinical Science shows how difficult the whole topic is. The impact of under nutrition on the ability to work, and on child development are the next 2 chapters and cover the field well. The aetiology of kweshiorkor proved interesting and there was a chapter on iodine deficiency disorders. A long chapter on growth charts was very theoretical and I am not sure that it exactly fitted in with the rest of the book. However, nutritional vulnerability in children and nutritional disease are covered in the final 5 chapters. These tended to have an anthropological basis but none the less were almost as interesting for a Physician as the beginning of the book. The book has been well prepared and edited and covered the topic in an interesting and readable way. I suspect that it is more likely to have a place as an introduction to the subject in both medical research and anthropological research. For people interested in these topics I can recommend the book.