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 look at food in a new way—as a vehicle that delivers tiny molecules called nutrients to your body. Eating foods with the right mix of nutrients supports health and wellness, while eating the wrong balance can harm your health.

This open educational resource (OER) was created by building on the work of other OER authors. Following the spirit of open education, we have updated and adapted their material to fit the needs of our students. In the same way, we are sharing this book so that others may use, adapt, and improve it for their own teaching and learning.

This OER has twelve chapters, each meant to cover about one week in a one-semester college course. Every chapter has six to ten sections that explain the main ideas in an easy-to-follow way. At the end of each section, you’ll find questions to help you review what you’ve learned. Many sections also include short videos and links to websites that give extra examples and add more depth to the topics.

Attributions

This section is an adaptation of “Introduction” in Nutrition: Science and Everyday Application, V. 1.0 by Alice Callahan, PhD; Heather Leonard, MEd, RDN; and Tamberly Powell, MS, RDN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License,