Nutrition's epic story revealed in new book

Why we eat what we eat is a vastly complex subject. It’s something Massey University nutritional ecologist Professor David Raubenheimer has spent many years researching, doing nutritional analyses of the feeding habits of everything from snapper and snow leopards to gannets, gorillas and humans.

The epic story of what determines dietary behaviour is told in a new book he co-authored with Australian professor Stephen Simpson, titled The Nature of Nutrition: A Unifying Framework from Animal Adaptation to Human Obesity (Princeton University Press).

The book is the first to explore nutrition’s enormously complex role on biology, both at the level of individual organisms and in relation to their broader ecological interactions.

In it the authors explain a theoretical approach they devised in order to analyse nutrition across a vast array of species and environments. Called the Geometric Framework, the innovative tool is used in measuring, defining and understanding the links between nutrition and the biology of animals, including humans. This includes physiological mechanisms that drive the nutritional interactions of the animal with its environment, and the consequences for health, immune responses and lifespan.

The authors show how the Geometric Framework can be used to study and tackle a wide range of issues, from how to optimise the diets of livestock or endangered species to addressing the causes of human obesity and metabolic disease.

Professor Raubenheimer, featured in the New Zealand Herald, Dominion Post and Manawatu Standard this week as part of the University’s latest campaign highlighting its expertise in environmental science and marine research, is based at the Institute of Natural Sciences at Albany. He will be speaking at the Albany campus Open Day this Saturday.