Perspectives in Nutrition is an introductory nutrition text appropriate for the majors and mixed majors nutrition courses. This student-focused text presents the major concepts in nutrition including the body's use of food nutrients and diet planning throughout the life cycle. The text places special emphasis on the application of nutrition principles in everyday life by exploring the health consequences of nutrition practices.

Perspectives in nutrition

Selenium deficiency in total parenteral nutrition.

In July, 1988, more than 300 scientists from 29 different countries gathered at Tiibingen, W. Germany, in order to spend 4 days discussing their favourite trace element, selenium. This meeting continued the good tradition of three previous meetings held in Corvallis/Oregon, 1976, in Lubbock/Texas, 1980, and in Beijing/China, in 1984. Incidentally, the University of Tiibingen provided a unique historical background for a Symposium devoted to recent advances in biochemistry, pharmacology, human nutrition and human health; here, the first independent depart ment of Physiological Chemistry in Germany was founded in 1845. Pro fessor H9Ppe-Seyler elucidated here the hemin structure and his student Friedrich Miescher discovered the nucleic acids. This book contains one-half of the oral or poster presentations which were selected before the meeting was held on the basis of a one page abstract. It is the reader who will have to decide whether this time consuming policy of quality assessment was warranted or not."

Selenium in biology and medicine

Biochemistry of essential fatty acids

The skeletal spectre of the marasmic child clearly results from a lack of intake of the bulk nutrients. It can be easily and consistently reproduced in any convenient species of experimental animal. In stark contrast, the other major form of malnutrition, kwashiorkor, has only once been convincingly reproduced in experimental animals. Coward & Whitehead (1972) produced oedema, fatty liver, skin lesions, hair discoloration and friability, hypoproteinaemia and mental changes in baboons by feeding the animals exactly the same diets that children with kwashiorkor received in Uganda. The authors demonstrated that the syndrome could be reproduced experimentally but made no attempt to discover the factor or factors in the diet responsible for the disease. In other studies the individual features of kwashiorkor had been singly and inconsistently reproduced in animals using a whole variety of, often extreme, experimental manipulations. The conditions necessary to give a ‘model’ for kwashiorkor oedema, for instance, are quite different from those used to give experimental fatty liver or hair discoloration. Why should the kwashiorkor syndrome be so difficult to reproduce experimentally I Why have the applied programmes designed to prevent kwashiorkor been so uniformly unsuccessful? The obvious first answer to be considered is that all the hypotheses that have been proposed, tested experimentally and used as the conceptual framework for the applied programmes, are incorrect. Certainly the extant hypotheses of protein deficiency (Williams, I 935)’ niacin deficiency (Gillman & Gillman, 195 I), antidiurectic-hormone-like action of free ferritin (Srikantia, 1958), dysadaptation to protein deficient stress (Gopalan, 1968), hormonal dysadaptation (Whitehead, 1979), or aflatoxin intoxication (Hendrickse, 1984), do not adequately explain more than a few of the features of kwashiorkor listed in Table I. These features must all be reconciled in any unifying hypothesis. Recently we have proposed that kwashiorkor results from an imbalance between the production of free radicals and their safe disposal (Golden, 1985). It is the purpose of the present paper to examine the evidence for such a hypothesis. The hypothesis, illustrated in Fig. I, states that in kwashiorkor, various noxae are imposed on the subject. These noxae produce free-radical-mediated lipid peroxides and toxic carbonyls. Under normal metabolic and nutritional

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Free Radicals in the Pathogenesis of Kwashiorkor

SummaryProtein-calorie malnutrition in Thai infants and young children is associated with significant reduction in plasma selenium without change in red cell selenium. Plasma selenium was restored to normal levels by treating these children with therapeutic diets containing protein, vitamins, and minerals but no added selenium.

Richard J. Levine

Papers

Blood selenium in Thai children with protein-calorie malnutrition.