"The groundwork of all happiness is health." - Leigh Hunt

A timeline of food as medicine

June 2, 2022 – Experts predict major advances in the approaching many years in using food to treat or prevent disease. The concept itself dates back 1000's of years. Here are some key developments:

2and Millennium BC: The Beginning. The Ebers Papyrus, a medical text from ancient Egypt, prescribed quite a few foods to treat ailments. It advisable things like goose fat for pain relief and liver for treating night blindness. Honey appeared in 500 remedies. In India, Ayurvedic medicine emerged at the identical time, by which food played an important role.

3rd Century BC:Traditional Chinese Medicine. The first Chinese medical book, Huang Di Nei Jing (The Yellow Emperor’s Medical Book)listed specific grains, fruits, animals and vegetables for optimal health the world's first dietary guidelines.

5th Century BC:Ancient Greek understanding. Hippocrates of Kos, considered the daddy of Western medicine, wrote concerning the connection between nutrition and health.

1747:Breakthrough in food as medicine. In search of a cure for scurvy, Scottish surgeon James Lind conducted the primary clinical trial aboard the British Royal Navy ship Salisbury. He found that citrus fruits were an efficient treatment, despite the fact that vitamin C was not discovered until the twentieth century.th Century.

Mid 19th Century:The science of nutrition. The concepts of calories and macronutrients (fat, protein and carbohydrates) were discovered and accepted.

1894:Early government recommendations. The U.S. Department of Agriculture published a Farmers' Bulletin that suggested a weight-reduction plan focused on macronutrients. Scientists had not yet identified specific minerals and vitamins.

1911:Vitamins discovered. The biochemist Casimir Funk proposed the concept of vitamins (“vita” for all times, “amine” for a kind of organic compound).

1921:Introduction of multivitamin preparations. The pharmaceutical company Parke, Davis registered the trademark for the primary multivitamin preparation, Metagen, calling it “vitamin products for therapeutic administration to promote nutrition.”

1924:Early fortified foods. In America, the primary food was fortified with iodine to forestall goiter, which was widespread on the time. Soon after, milk was fortified with vitamin D.

1941:National Nutrition Conference. Months before the United States officially entered World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt convened the National Nutrition Conference for Defense, which led to the event of the primary advisable each day allowances of nutrients.

1977:The connection between nutrition and disease is highlighted. Because research showed a link between fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium and chronic disease, the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs shifted the main focus of dietary goals for the United States from consuming adequate nutrients to avoiding potentially harmful amounts. Three years later, the primary Dietary Guidelines for Americans were published.

1990:Indication of dietary values ​​is mandatory. The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act required nutrition labeling on most food packages and established specific health claims. The first labels appeared in 1994.

1999: The connection between DNA and nutrition. As a part of the Human Genome Project, scientists have coined the brand new term “nutrigenomics” to explain the interplay between the food you eat and your genetic makeup.

2005: Your weight-reduction plan, your microbiome and your health. Although scientists have been studying the microbiome for a whole lot of years, plenty of breakthroughs have shown that the food we eat not only changes the bacteria in our gut, but that the microbiome can be linked to diseases akin to obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.