Addressing Health Beneficial Aspects of Nutrition: The Example of the Obesity Epidemic

We know for more than 2000 years that health and nutrition are intimately linked: Hippocrates recommended ca. 400 BC to “leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food”. While modern nutrition focuses rather on prevention than cure (the latter being the classical pharmaceutical domain of care), Hippocrates' concept still holds very much true and it particularly applies to the interplay of nutrition with energy balance, cardiovascular health, immunity, and protein turnover, which are the four themes addressed in this “nutrition and health” section of the book. Introducing mass spectrometric impact on nutritionally actionable health aspects we focus first on the global health issue of obesity.