Introduction

What comes to mind when you think of food?

What does it mean to you?

Maybe it’s this morning’s breakfast that you grabbed while running out the door to make it to class  or work on time.

Or perhaps it’s watching the famous chefs on the Food Network preparing gourmet dishes.

Or is it the feeling of soil crumbling between your fingers as you prepare a garden bed for the first seeds of spring?

Or maybe you think of the traditional foods of your family’s culture, recipes shared for generation to generation, and special foods shared around the holiday table.

In this book we present another dimension of food – the vehicle to deliver a variety of tiny molecules known as nutrients to your body. As you read, we hope you begin to understand that consuming foods with the right  mix of nutrients promotes wellness,  whereas the wrong may have detrimental effects on health.

In developing this open learning resource (OER), we leaned heavily on the previous work of other OER authors. In the spirit of open education, we’ve built on their foundation, updating it and tailoring the material to the needs of our students. In that same spirit, we’re sharing it so that others can use it or revise the content to meet their needs.

This OER is divided into 13  units that roughly correspond to one week of learning in our one-semester college course.  Each unit comprises six to ten sections. The end of each section includes self-check questions to test your understanding of the content. When possible, we’ve embedded short videos and links to website to expand upon and enrich the content of the text.

Image Credit:

Photo by  CDC/Amanda Mills.  (2011) Source: Public Health Image Library at https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=13681