History of Nutritional Immunology:

Introduction and Overview

Nutritional immunology, or immunonutrition, is a newly recognized scientific subdiscipline interrelating  the seemingly disparate fields of immunology and nutrition. But despite their apparent independence, myriad observations, some quite old and some quite new, clearly show that the immune system cannot function optimally if malnutrition is present. Malnutrition also produces adverse effects on antigenically nonspecific mechanisms of host defense. The clinical and public health importance of nutritional immunology is also receiving attention. Immune system dysfunctions that result from malnutrition are, in fact, Nutritionally Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (NAIDS). NAIDS afflicts millions of people in the Third World, as well as thousands in modern centers, i.e., patients with cachexia secondary to serious disease, neoplasia or trauma. As estimated during the 1990 World  Summit for Children at the United Nations, attended by President George Bush and more than 50 other heads of state, 40,000 deaths occur each day worldwide in children under the age of five. Because malnutrition is the common denominator in most of these deaths, it must be assumed that NAIDS is playing its deadly role. On the brighter side, however, and unlike the much more highly publicized acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), i.e., virus-induced AIDS, the im-munological dysfunctions of NAIDS can generally be reversed quickly by correcting the nutritional problems that allowed NAIDS to develop in the first place. Emergence of nutritional immunology as a new scientific subdiscipline of vast public health and clinical importance naturally raises questions about its historic origins (1, 2), which are linked closely to scientific findings in both parent sciences.

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