Treatment of Nutritional Disturbances

Abstract

The term nutrition has much broader implications than is generally appreciated. It implies not only the eating of foods, minerals, vitamins and the like, but also the food’s conversion into materials which the body can use. Finally, nutrition implies the way in which the body uses the material it digests to maintain growth, replacement, activity and good health. This includes, therefore, not only digestive processes in the intestine, but also metabolic processes all over the body, chemical and physical processes which are involved in maintaining the various physiologic activities of the organs and tissues of the body, and its constancy, or to use the presently more fashionable term, homeostasis. Nutritional diseases may be divided into dietary, electrolyte and metabolic disturbances.