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This article suffers from a lack of organization.
Human nutrition has its own article and there should be a human nutrition section in this article to help segregate that material. I will start one. It is also clear that much of the material in this article's nutrients section should be delegated to the
nutrient article. In other words, this article should focus on the general science of plant/animal/human nutrition and delegate the more specialized material to the other articles. This should also be distinguished from
food science.
Nutrition science redirects here. I suggest that it would be helpful to rename this article to "nutrition science" in order to emphasize its appropriate focus. I invite responses on this talk page before starting the regular rename process.--
Sharonmil (
talk)
17:32, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
Requested move
The following discussion is an archived discussion of a
requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
Nutrition will become a redirect. Yes, this was a "good article" for a while, but the other, more specialized articles have been created with no objections and no one seems to be suggesting that they be merged back in. Please do not perceive this as a loss of quality: the information will be better organized. It seems that even "nutrition science" will become more an outline or survey as we delegate more of the material in the sections with a "main" template to those other, more specialized articles. Better organization of the information is better quality.--
Sharonmil (
talk)
22:03, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
There's no point in the title change if
nutrition merely redirects to
nutrition science. It's substituting a more complex name for a more common name, and that's a violation of both the letter and the spirit of
WP:COMMONNAME. This sort of rename does nothing to improve the organization of a set of articles; it would, rather, cause confusion as people wonder what "nutrition science" is and how it differs from "nutrition". I thus oppose this move without further evidence of a clear benefit.
PowersT18:45, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a
requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
content partnership
Hello,
I'm the Founder of Fast Track to Fat Loss and if you could please forward this on to the decision-maker in charge of new content and/or business development, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks in advance!
Several years ago I teamed up with super-star celebrity trainer (from The Biggest Loser) and best-selling author, Kim Lyons, to create a vast amount of really good weight loss and fitness content. Well, we're willing to offer it to you at no charge, and even feature Kim on your site as a celebrity fitness expert/endorsement! The content we have to offer includes…
None of the items you list are consistent with Wikipedia's content policies. Content donation is certainly welcome, but it should be of an encyclopedic nature, not what would typically be found in magazines or newspapers. (See also
WP:NOT.) Moreover, Wikipedia does not enter into such partnerships, especially where promotion of one or more companies is involved. (Note that there is no such thing as a decision-maker on this site; it is built by consensus of the community. You may want to discuss issues with the Wikimedia Foundation, who oversee the site, but they'll likely give you the same answer.)
Mindmatrix20:55, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
Main Image
The main image from the side of a box of food is not a very clear image. It's what something would look like if someone who required glasses were not wearing them. Maybe a better version exists?
Niluop (
talk)
01:18, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
The U. S. labeling system is very misleading and masks more information than it provides. For instance it assumes that all fats are the same, although, it is stated elsewhere in the article that some fats are essential and others are not. How can the average person tell if the basis of the label whether the food is healthy or not? ~~Tom Gibson~~ — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Tmgibs34 (
talk •
contribs)
06:42, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
Edit request on 2 May 2012
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.
Please change the Finnish lang link from
fi:Ravitsemustiede to
fi:Ravinto. The first means "Nutritional science" but the second is "Nutrition".
There are different kinds of carbohydrates—simple or refined, and unrefined. A typical American consumes about 50% of their carbohydrates as simple sugars, which are added to foods as opposed to sugars that come naturally in fruits and vegetables. These simple sugars come in large amounts in sodas and fast food. Over the course of a year, the average American consumes 54 gallons of soft drinks, which contain the highest amount of added sugars.[1] Even though carbohydrates are necessary for humans to function, they are not all equally healthful. When machinery has been used to remove bits of high fiber, the carbohydrates are refined. These are the carbohydrates found in white bread and fast food.[2]
Reasons: US-centric statements; confuses
simple sugar (glucose, fructose, which
occur plenty in fruits), the difference between 'refined carbohydrates' and
refined grains, which are not mentioned in the bbc reference, but rather after clicking food groups/starchy groups. There is so much wrong with this paragraph that the article is better off without it.
Han-Kwang (
t)
18:59, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Edit request
The citation bot found errors (6/29/2013) as follows:
Greetings. May I please ask why the History of nutrition is at the end of this article? Almost every case I can think of on Wikipedia would place history first. Thank you. -
SusanLesch (
talk)
21:41, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
Beats me. Somebody who does science templates simply deprecates history, and has suggested that it be put last. I've fought this template-mania in articles about
chemical elements, for example. And for some elements, history is more important than it is for others (look at a few examples, to see how we've handled it)
There is no right or wrong answer, here, I would suggest. In general, younger people are less interested in history than older people. Is anybody interested in the history of medicine, other than old doctors? Not in my experience. The same is true to some extent in physics, and (to lesser extents) in other sciences.
Now, the other side of the argument is that people come to an encyclopedia to find out about X or Y, and it's wrong to make somebody wade though all the bad ideas about (say) atoms, before you let them in on the real dope about what we think about atoms in 2013. And I think there's a point to be made here. There is an entire articles on the history of this stuff at
atomic theory and
atomism. Is ANY of it really important if you're trying to find out something about what atoms ARE? Perhaps not really. Or a synopsis can stay at the end. History is more important to some subjects that other subjects, even in the sciences. If the history explains a lot of otherwise incomprehensible stuff about why we call something this or that, or think about it this way rather than that way, then it's probably easier to put the history in, for the benefit if the reader. Always the axiom is "put in the information at just the point that the reader is likely to want to know it." That sometimes means that some diluted history can go up front, especially as regards etymology, while leaving more detail later, and (always) a lot of detail to a proper sub-article, per
WP:SS. So this is an art.
In all my own opinion is that you introduce aspects of history when needed to explain "why." The remainder of history as a subject in and of itself, can be swept up later (at the end if it's really boring). And of course, there are dedicated history articles to turn to when length drives you to it.
In short, feel free to mount rescue operations for aspects of history in any science. But make sure that what you're rescuing would be something a really interested person would want to know, at the point in your discussion that you bring it in. Is it helpful just here? If not, it can wait.
SBHarris01:49, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for your reply. I think in this field where so little is known, and so much was discovered so recently, that history has to come first. We don't know enough to dodge it. Meanwhile, I tagged the history section since 1900 as unreferenced. When all of its claims have page numbers or links to reliable sources that anybody with a computer can read, then I would be bolder about moving it. -
SusanLesch (
talk)
13:00, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
Malnutrition Chart
I noticed that the chart was incomplete. The conditions caused by excessive amounts of Vitamin B1, B2, and B12 have not been stated. Here is an article that describes what happens when excess B12 is in the body:
B12 in excess. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
MaximusAlphus (
talk •
contribs)
06:05, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
Sections again
Today I reordered the "Nutrients" section according to some simple categories from
Joel Fuhrman 2014. I don't understand why no other Wikipedia editor has tried to categorize nutrients. Corrections are most welcome. -
SusanLesch (
talk)
16:21, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
Order of sections
Hello. I plan to make the following change in order of the sections next week unless there are objections. To explain, "Sports nutrition" is not a subset of "Animal nutrition". Neither is "malnutrition". No plans yet to
move the history section up (because it's not done yet).
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The list of trace minerals looks a little odd. On the one hand, it's not missing anything. However, it has two borderline cases (nickel and vanadium) that should probably be listed separately.
In the US two agencies decide which trace elements are officially designated as essential, the FDA an the USDA. They rely on the National Research Council and the National Academy of Medicine to advise them. Other countries have something similar.
There seems to be a general consensus on which minerals have met the essentiality criteria. Then there are six elements that are considered by the advisory bodies to be "possibly" or "probably" essential, with very high standards of evidence for both categories.
Everyone seems to agree that these six elements are either possibly or probably essential: arsenic, boron, fluorine, nickel, silicon, and vanadium. Boron is generally at the top of everyone's list. Fluorine gets a free pass because of the prophylactic value of fluoride, although fluorine is actually considered possibly essential. Nickel and boron are listed on UK food labels as essential nutrients, even though the scientific bodies have only said "probably." Silicon is of special interest in the US because the large numbers of people who receive all their nutrition intravenously (permanent total parenteral nutrition), especially since they switched from glass to plastic.
Zyxwv99 (
talk)
03:44, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
The trace elements you list - arsenic, boron, fluorine, nickel, silicon, and vanadium - are not included among essential nutrients (fluoride excepted) because no disease occurs when they are absent from the human diet (definition of "essential").
The FDA lists this guide of the essential nutrients as guidance to manufacturers for food product labeling and the
Institute of Medicine (IOM) publishes
this table of nutrients with recommended intake levels. Also, to clarify, the function for nutrient definition conducted by the USDA is to collect foods and analyze their nutrient contents, creating
the USDA National Nutrient Database. The FDA is a higher, public-facing organization that regulates food labels and health claims under scientific guidance from the IOM,
one of the US National Academies. Summarizing: arsenic, boron, nickel, silicon, and vanadium are not considered essential because there is insufficient clinical evidence to indicate that their absence from the diet results in diseases. --
Zefr (
talk)
04:57, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
I think you missed the point of what I was trying to say. Nickel and vanadium are currently listed in this article as essential nutrients under: Nutrition -> Micronutrients -> Minerals -> Trace elements. I was suggesting that they be removed from this list because their essentiality has not been definitively established and because they are not recognized by the FDA as essential.
Next, I mentioned the USDA because they are one of the three organizations that the FDA relies on to decide what nutrients are essential in humans. The USDA does its own research on plant and animal nutrition, which is an integral part of the fact-gathering process. USDA has also been involved in human research on
Parenteral nutrition, including "permanent total parenteral nutrition." This involves the estimated 20,000 Americans who will never be able to eat food, but must rely permanently on scientifically formulated solutions. The USDA has been at the forefront of nutrition research in this area.
What brought me to this article is that I just spent a lot of time cleaning up the article
Composition of the human body. Many elements were listed as "esential" even though the evidence seemed flimsy. Worse yet, when I looked up our articles on those elements, I saw extravagant health claims. (For example
Strontium#Biological_role,
Lithium#Biological, and
Bromine#Biological_role) This article, Nutrition, is one of the problem articles that I am trying to fix.
On the other hand, since I don't want to get into edit wars with people who have their favorite elements, I was willing to suggest a compromise on those elements that are widely recognized as "probably essential." For example, the UK has officially listed Boron and Nickel as essential, even though their own scientists only say "probably essential" (
NHS). Australia and New Zealand have listed fluoride as officially essential, even though their own scientists only say "probably essential" (
Australia / New Zealand). Here in the US, the National Research Council has given a similar endorsement to arsenic, boron, fluorine, nickel, silicon, and vanadium. My point was that if any of these other elements are listed, they should be listed separately with a disclaimer.
Zyxwv99 (
talk)
23:26, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
All sounds fine. Thanks for the explanation. I suggest you go ahead and make the edits with
WP:SCIRS sources. I'll go through the body composition article as another pair of eyes for review and editing. --
Zefr (
talk)
23:34, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. I think for now it might be a good idea just to delete the offending items. At some point in the future I'd like to mention boron and nickel in the UK and fluoride in Australia and New Zealand (separately from the other items), but I'd like to be able to document the rationale behind it, that these elements have not fully met the criteria for essentiality. Meanwhile, have you seen our article on Chromium? The section on Biological role looks problematic.
Chromium#Biological_role. I tried to fix the related article
Chromium deficiency.
Zyxwv99 (
talk)
15:21, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
That section on chromium points out the absence of a clear physiological mechanism and gives
WP:UNDUE weight to it not being an essential nutrient. Since chromium is accepted by
WP:MEDRS sources as an essential nutrient, we should rewrite that section using
this NIH-ODS source (which draws from Institute of Medicine analysis) and its 100% DV level as 120 ug,
shown via FDA guidelines here. Also, USDA-NIH have assessed
chromium content in foods per the ODS, so the last paragraph of the chromium article also needs revision; I'll work on that today. --
Zefr (
talk)
16:18, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
Dietary minerals
There is currently a discussion under way on the talk page of
Dietary element. Originally the article was entitled Trace minerals, but was intended in the sense of nutrition. Then it got changed to Dietary minerals. Then someone changed it to Dietary elements, although the focus of the article remains dietary minerals. I'm new to this article, but as part of a general cleanup, I suggested going back to the name Dietary mineral. (That term already redirects to the article.) Then someone decided to put it to a vote. So far we have one in favor (not counting me) and one opposed. The person opposed wants to rewrite the article to make it literally about all elements that people take in. As I understand it, certain elements, such oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur, are not usually listed as essential nutrients, at least not for humans, because they are included in other food categories such as protein, (complex) carbohydrates, (simple) sugars, etc. I'm thinking we should not try to rewrite the book on nutrition, but just stick with conventional nomenclature and concepts.
Zyxwv99 (
talk)
01:19, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
These are essentially identical concepts. Nutrition is the science. "Nutritional science" appears to be a rebranding of the word nutrition among university departments, similar to "
plant science" being a sexy rebranding of "
botany".
--Animalparty! (
talk)
20:36, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Oh my word, good catch
SusanLesch. Since this article (and nutrition science, so far) is predominantly about human nutrition, I would say we don't want both. It looks as if large chucks of
human nutrition have been cribbed from
nutrition, so regardless of whether both are kept, a lot of editing word needs to be done. See, e.g., the 'Mental agility' section on both pages, identical except for formatting. —
J D (
talk)
04:26, 25 May 2016 (UTC)
Support. Nutrition is a science, as it says in the lede. "Nutritional science" is redundant. —
J D (
talk)
12:13, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
Support. Curious why the Nutritional science article was created in the first place. I'm assuming the proposal actually is that the Nutritional science article be merged/redirected to the Nutrition article since there is no substantive content in the former. Correct? --
Zefr (
talk)
00:25, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
Support. Though I am not a fluent speaker of English, both articles seem to describe the exact same thing. I can't figure out how
Nutritional science can evolve to a complete article. Maybe it's time to proceed with the redirect, as there are no objections and the discussion is growing really old.
SucreRouge (
talk)
22:11, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Nutrition / Human nutrition
I agree with
SusanLesch and
J D (above, closed discussion) that this article about nutrition reads a lot like human nutrition. Either WP needs to significantly reduce this article so that is a more balanced overview of nutrition in all plants and animals, and leave more of the
Human nutrition details to the human nutrition article, or junk the human nutrition page and have an advisory at the top that this is about human nutrition, see also animal nutrition and plant nutrition. As presently constructed, one has to go through pages and pages of materials before arriving at the redirect to
Animal nutrition and the section on
Plant nutrition.
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Hello,
User:Zefr. Regarding
your edit. I am happy to replace the quote from Mozaffarian with an equivalent statement that the field of nutrition is about half studied. Can you please find one and add it to the lead? To say it is not significant is indefensible so I await your explanation. -
SusanLesch (
talk)
14:17, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
To say a field is "half-studied" is subjective. The statement needs a
systematic review, in this case (because the article is about human nutrition), a
WP:MEDRS-quality review. I am unaware of a rigorous review that would support such a statement. --
Zefr (
talk)
15:43, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
Good answer @
Zefr: Except would you kindly point me to the Wikipedia decision that says nutrition is governed by
WP:MEDRS? I don't believe that is the case. -
SusanLesch (
talk)
16:40, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
It's not a policy, it's common sense. The first sentence and last paragraph of the lede show why. --
Zefr (
talk)
16:49, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
Your issue may be better served at
Human nutrition. An op-ed like the 538 article isn't helpful (even though I agree it's true). You don't have consensus here, so I suggest you try raising the issue at
WT:MED where it has been discussed over years in perspective of MEDRS. --
Zefr (
talk)
00:11, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
I skimmed the first 500 archived discussions for "nutrition" at
WT:MED. As of three years ago nobody answered the question "Are nutritional articles within project
scope? We would do better to try to improve Wikipedia by getting a ruling through a formal RFC. I would support you if you decide to do that. -
SusanLesch (
talk)
19:57, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
I took the quote by Mozaffarian: "Twenty years ago, I think we knew about 10 percent of what we need to know about nutrition, And now we know about 40 or 50 percent.” as saying that there is more to learn. And I believe that every Dean of a school of nutrition would have a similar opinion, if only for job security. There are better ways to indicate the extent of unknowns. For every essential nutrient listed in the Dietary Reference Intakes documents published by the U.S. Institute of Medicine there is a concluding section on research recommendations. Mentioning this as acknowledgement of nutrition as a work in progress would be better than a newspaper article.
David notMD (
talk)
02:09, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
@
David notMD: Two things. First would you please add an appropriate quote or paraphrase from U.S. DRI literature? (I looked at only one, for calcium and vitamin D, which was over
a thousand pages.) Second, can you agree to support an RFC that would put nutrition articles inside WikiProject Medicine? (I realize that the project has added its banner to this talk page but discussion places nutrition on the fringe. There appears to be support for it being in scope.) -
SusanLesch (
talk)
14:07, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
In that link to DRIs for calcium and vitamin D, research gaps discussed on pages 513-522.
IMO any information on DRI identification of research gaps belongs in the Wikipedia articles about each nutrient rather than in this Nutrition article. I will add that the value of doing this is small, one reason being that many of the DRI texts on individual nutrients have not been updated in 10-15 years, hence recommendations for future research not up to date.
David notMD (
talk)
22:35, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
Education
I propose to move information on studies on people's food choices and programs (like ENFEP which is already on this page) to help consumers make informed choices on healthy foods from
Food desert. It seems like a better home here than
Food choice.
Skingski (
talk)
18:04, 16 July 2017 (UTC)(
talk)
Consider any moves to the article "Human Nutrition" rather than here ("Nutrition"). And maybe some other stuff from here to "Human Nutrition".
David notMD (
talk)
03:04, 19 July 2017 (UTC)
I completely agree that if
Nutrition is a general page, why is there any space wasted on USDA recommendations, etc. on human nutrition? Nutrition is too fragmented across Wikipedia. We need more coherence somehow. Definitely looks like a lot should be moved between Healthy diet, Human nutrition and Nutrition education; maybe Nutrition and pregnancy. Why is there a Nutrition physiology page? -- that isn't even good English.
Skingski (
talk)
17:05, 19 July 2017 (UTC)(
talk)
Deleted Healthy Diets section, as not appropriate for this Nutrition article. All content already covered either in Human Nutrition, Healthy Diet or French Paradox articles. As written, the section was not only misplaced, but woefully incomplete, as it presented only two concepts of what a healthy diet might be.
David notMD (
talk)
14:04, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
Not a Good Article...
...and debatable whether it even rates B-Class. So much of this article is unreferenced, badly referenced, content is in the wrong place, or major questions are not even addressed (examples: nutrition and dementia, sports performance).
David notMD (
talk)
22:38, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
This page claims to be about nutrition in general, and has links to more specific nutrition pages (human, animal, plant), but in fact it is overwhelmingly about human nutrition. This seems like a case of
WP:OVERLAP. It would be better to have a sleek page here discussing only the fundamental concepts of nutrition in general, providing small introductions to each sub-discipline, and linking out. Most of this page could then be merged with
Human nutrition.
Kyle MoJo (
talk)
17:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
Hello. I removed the following from the History section. Here is everything in case anybody needs it.
A 2014 meta-analysis concluded that adenovirus 36 (Ad36) infection is associated with an increased risk of obesity development.[3]
^William D. McArdle, Frank I. Katch, Victor L. Katch (2006). Exercise Physiology: Energy, Nutrition, and Human Performance. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.{{
cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link)
^Shang Q, Wang H, Song Y, Wei L, Lavebratt C, Zhang F, Gu H (2014). "Serological data analyses show that adenovirus 36 infection is associated with obesity: a meta-analysis involving 5739 subjects". Obesity (Silver Spring). 22 (3): 895–900.
doi:
10.1002/oby.20533.
PMID23804409.
Howdy I am a student and will be reviewing and trying to edit this page, I would love some input on anything you all think would be helpful to add or with any of the edits that I do make. What I have noticed that I will try to be editing is the concepts I believe that it should focus and capture the concept of nutrition.
Samanthajones101 (
talk)
01:26, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
I've been putting that off because I'm not sure how this article should address it. The best thing I can think of would be to have a paragraph under Nutrients that covers how nutrition leads into metabolism. I've written a few sentences to that effect throughout the article, but nothing comprehensive.
Thebiguglyalien (
talk)
22:00, 8 August 2022 (UTC)