Nutritional science
science that interprets the nutrients and other substances in food in relation to maintenance, growth, reproduction, health and disease of an organism
Nutritional science (also nutrition science, sometimes short nutrition, dated trophology) is the science that studies the physiological process of nutrition (primarily human nutrition), interpreting the nutrients and other substances in food in relation to maintenance, growth, reproduction, health and disease of an organism.
History
Before nutritional science emerged as an independent study disciplines, mainly chemists worked in this area. The chemical composition of food was examined. Macronutrients, especially protein, fat and carbohydrates, have been the focus components of the study of (human) nutrition since the 19th century. Until the discovery of vitamins and vital substances, the quality of nutrition was measured exclusively by the intake of nutritional energy.
The early years of the 20th century were summarized by Kenneth John Carpenter in his Short History of Nutritional Science as "the vitamin era". The first vitamin was isolated and chemically defined in 1926 (thiamine). The isolation of vitamin C followed in 1932 and its effects on health, the protection against scurvy, was scientifically documented for the first time.
At the instigation of the British physiologist John Yudkin at the University of London, the degrees Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in nutritional science were established in the 1950s.
Nutritional science as a separate discipline was institutionalized in Germany in November 1956 when Hans-Diedrich Cremer was appointed to the chair for human nutrition in Giessen.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Nutritional science” as science that interprets the nutrients and other substances in food in relation to maintenance, growth, reproduction, health and disease of an organism. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17652193. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1926, 1932 and 1956.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nutritional science” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.