Diet is a complex aggregate of foods and behaviors. The food is constituted of a • wide variety of intended and unintended chemicals which may act singly on human metabolism, but more likely act in groups in a synergistic fashion. The study of nutrition and disease in aggregates of human beings—nutritional • epidemiology—is hampered by the dif fi culty in accurately characterizing this complex ...

Most people want to know how they can improve their health by implementation of a proper diet. Therefore nutritional epidemiology studies, which correlate the intake of specific nutrients, food items, or dietary patterns with health outcomes, receive substantial interest in the media. However, the results of many nutritional epidemiology studies have not been replicated in subsequent studies. T...

Nutritional epidemiology is concerned to elucidate the relationship between intakes of specific foods and nutrients, and specified health outcomes. Usually the outcome of interest is the incidence of a disease. Typically epidemiological evidence for such a relationship exists at two levels: (1) the macro level, in which each data-point refers to an aggregation of subjects for example, a country...

OBJECTIVE To illustrate biomarkers of diet that can be used to validate estimates of dietary intake in the study of gene-environment interactions in complex diseases. DESIGN Prospective cohort studies, studies of biomarkers where diet is carefully controlled. SETTING Free-living individuals, volunteers in metabolic suites. SUBJECTS Male and female human volunteers. RESULTS Recent studie...