Nutrition and Cardiology: An Interface not to be Ignored

Food and nutrition constitute a field of knowledge with inherent characteristics. In the first half of the twentieth century, the major objectives of the nutritional sciences consisted in discovering essential nutrients, characterizing their physiological and biochemical roles, and describing the consequences of their defficiencies. Very frequently, the fundamental model of the study was animal growth.

However, in the past 50 years, the spread of knowledge expanded the objectives related to food and nutrition, which were inserted in an organizational complexity focused on cells, organs, organisms and communities, ranging, therefore, from molecules to populations. The challenges to understand the physiopathological mechanisms involved and to prevent and occasionally solve consequent clinical problems constitute a decisive stimulus to the development of new fields of knowledge within that of food and nutrition. Of those, the relationship between food, obesity and diseases frequently associated with obesity, the so-called chronic diseases, such as arterial hypertension, coronary artery disease, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemias, and cancer, is noteworthy.

[…]