Clinical Nutrition Basics for Medical Students

This book is designed to make nutrition counseling simple and efficient for the health professional. Counseling patients on preventive health can be challenging and overwhelming for providers, especially considering the abundance of conflicting literature and mixed messages from the media about diet. Additionally, the amount of educational training dedicated to nutrition is abysmal. Patients are receiving minimal nutritional counseling and if they do receive advice from practitioners, it is often vague and insufficient to effectively help in making a healthy lifestyle change. Considering the startling prevalence of chronic diseases in the U.S. this is a major public health concern that demands attention. As a result, this book was created to assist providers in delivering effective nutrition counseling. The book is organized in a user-friendly format where each chapter pertains to a common chronic disease such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes and obesity. It is intended for providers to quickly reference during an interaction with a patient for guidance in prescribing a particular diet. The chapters are concise, straight-forward, and systematic. Each chapter contains a few brief points on the epidemiology, pathophysiology, causes, and risk factors of the chronic disease. Each section concludes with a nutrition prescription as well as common patient question & answer scenarios. A table of contents includes a list of all the diseases discussed in the book for easy reference.