Despite its importance to health, nutrition has been overlooked as a science for too long, said Dr. Bernadine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and dean of Ohio State University College of Medicine. Dr. Healy, also on staff at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, was the guest speaker at the annual meeting of the Friends of the Center for Human Nutrition. She was the first female director of the NIH, launched the NIH Women's Health Initiative and established a strategic plan to guide research efforts into the next century. She recently wrote "A New Prescription for Women's Health."
Nutrition has been cast aside as a serious science by universities that still restrict nutrition study to schools of home economics instead of schools of medicine, she said. Even the NIH never viewed it as an integrated discipline. She said nutrition--along with raising women's health as a national concern--was one of the biggest struggles she faced at the NIH.
"I kept wondering how we were going to get more scientists to spend their careers in nutrition," Dr. Healy said. "I thought, 'maybe if we called it 'bionutrition' it would sound a little fancier. "The nutrition that we have investigated from the scientific point of view with NIH dollars largely has been disease-related--heart disease or cancer. But to look at the total science of nutrition, which really is about chemistry and biology, has been hard coming. As a result, we don't have the kind of investigative centers and investment in centers across the country that we've seen with areas like cancer and heart disease. We have to recognize that the practice of medicine is clearly driven by research--by facts. We have a long way to go in this field."
Dr. Healy commended UT Southwestern's Center for Human Nutrition and its director Dr. Scott Grundy for being heavily grounded in science, calling it both an "exceptional" center and an asset to the city. Speaking as "cardiologist and a mom" she also imparted nutritional advice.The American diet tends to be very rich in protein, more than most other diets around the world, Dr. Healy said. While that in itself is not bad, protein travels in bad company--namely, animal fat. "Fat is the No. 1 enemy in your diet. A small amount of fat is essential for our physical and mental health, but the key is fat moderation," she said.
"Vegetable oil and especially the monounsaturates, like olive oil and canola oil, are the good fats," she said. "In general, if it's liquid it's probably OK. The bad fats are generally the saturated fats, and they tend to be solid at room temperature and, therefore, occur in meats and dairy products and in palm and coconut oil, which are solid at room temperature."Dr. Healy also advised eating more complex carbohydrates, not worrying about salt if you have healthy kidneys and examining the amount of fiber in your diet, which is a good marker for the kind of dietary pattern you've developed.
This is an exciting time for nutrition research, she said, because of new discoveries, such as obesity-related genes and an aspirin-like compound found in tomatoes. "We haven't sorted it all out," she said, "but the recently discovered leptin receptor in the brain will probably be really dynamic in terms of our understanding about weight. "As we gain more information, we're going to see a lot is opening up for us. But however much information opens up for us, it all points to the same thing--we have to do the work.
