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Steven H. Zeisel is an American academic. He is Professor Emeritus in Nutrition and Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [1]
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Steven H. Zeisel is an American academic. He is Professor Emeritus in Nutrition and Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [1]
Zeisel earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1975, was a resident in pediatrics at Yale University from 1975 to 1977, and earned his Ph.D. in nutrition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.
Zeisel is the Kenan Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Nutrition in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of the UNC's Nutrition Research Institute at the newly formed North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, North Carolina and the UNC Nutrition Obesity Research Center.
He served as chair of the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1990 to 2005. He was also the director UNC Human Clinical Nutrition Research Center and the director UNC Center for Excellence in Children's Nutrition at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He is currently a member of the American Society for Nutrition, the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition, the American College of Nutrition and the Society for Pediatric Research, among others.
He has served on the Annual Review of Nutrition's editorial committee and continues to serve on the FASEB Journal editorial board. Zeisel is a member of the World Cancer Research Fund's Expert Panel on “Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective.” He serves as the principal investigator on multiple federally funded research projects that focus on human requirements for choline and the effects of this nutrient on brain development. He has authored more than 280 scientific publications.
He has been criticized for accepting funding from the Egg Board for his studies of choline, a nutrient that eggs contain high amounts of. [2]
A nutrient is a substance used by an organism to survive, grow and reproduce. The requirement for dietary nutrient intake applies to animals, plants, fungi and protists. Nutrients can be incorporated into cells for metabolic purposes or excreted by cells to create non-cellular structures such as hair, scales, feathers, or exoskeletons. Some nutrients can be metabolically converted into smaller molecules in the process of releasing energy such as for carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and fermentation products leading to end-products of water and carbon dioxide. All organisms require water. Essential nutrients for animals are the energy sources, some of the amino acids that are combined to create proteins, a subset of fatty acids, vitamins and certain minerals. Plants require more diverse minerals absorbed through roots, plus carbon dioxide and oxygen absorbed through leaves. Fungi live on dead or living organic matter and meet nutrient needs from their host.
Vitamin deficiency is the condition of a long-term lack of a vitamin. When caused by not enough vitamin intake it is classified as a primary deficiency, whereas when due to an underlying disorder such as malabsorption it is called a secondary deficiency. An underlying disorder can have 2 main causes:
Choline is a cation with the chemical formula [(CH3)3NCH2CH2OH]+. Choline forms various salts, such as choline chloride and choline bitartrate. It is an essential nutrient for humans and many other animals, and is a structural part of phospholipids and cell membranes.
B vitamins are a class of water-soluble vitamins that play important roles in cell metabolism and synthesis of red blood cells. They are a chemically diverse class of compounds.
Lecithin is a generic term to designate any group of yellow-brownish fatty substances occurring in animal and plant tissues which are amphiphilic – they attract both water and fatty substances, and are used for smoothing food textures, emulsifying, homogenizing liquid mixtures, and repelling sticking materials.
Vitamin B4 is a former designation given to several distinct chemical compounds, none of which is currently considered a true vitamin:
Trimethylglycine is an amino acid derivative that occurs in plants. Trimethylglycine was the first betaine discovered; originally it was simply called betaine because, in the 19th century, it was discovered in sugar beets.
The North Carolina Research Campus (NCRC) is a public-private research center in Kannapolis, North Carolina, United States. The Campus was envisioned by David H. Murdock, owner of Dole Food Company and Castle and Cooke, Inc., as a center for improving human health through research into nutrition and agriculture. The campus was formed and operates as a partnership with the State of North Carolina and the University of North Carolina system.
Many dietary recommendations have been proposed to reduce the risk of cancer, few have significant supporting scientific evidence. Obesity and drinking alcohol have been correlated with the incidence and progression of some cancers. Lowering the consumption of sweetened beverages is recommended as a measure to address obesity.
Phosphatidylethanolamine N-methyltransferase is a transferase enzyme which converts phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) to phosphatidylcholine (PC) in the liver. In humans it is encoded by the PEMT gene within the Smith–Magenis syndrome region on chromosome 17.
Nutritional neuroscience is the scientific discipline that studies the effects various components of the diet such as minerals, vitamins, protein, carbohydrates, fats, dietary supplements, synthetic hormones, and food additives have on neurochemistry, neurobiology, behavior, and cognition.
Nutriepigenomics is the study of food nutrients and their effects on human health through epigenetic modifications. There is now considerable evidence that nutritional imbalances during gestation and lactation are linked to non-communicable diseases, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, and cancer. If metabolic disturbances occur during critical time windows of development, the resulting epigenetic alterations can lead to permanent changes in tissue and organ structure or function and predispose individuals to disease.
A bioactive compound is a compound that has an effect on a living organism, tissue or cell, usually demonstrated by basic research in vitro or in vivo in the laboratory. While dietary nutrients are essential to life, bioactive compounds have not been proved to be essential – as the body can function without them – or because their actions are obscured by nutrients fulfilling the function.
Relatively speaking, the brain consumes an immense amount of energy in comparison to the rest of the body. The mechanisms involved in the transfer of energy from foods to neurons are likely to be fundamental to the control of brain function. Human bodily processes, including the brain, all require both macronutrients, as well as micronutrients.
In general, cognitive support diets are formulated to include nutrients that have a known role in brain development, function and/or maintenance, with the goal of improving and preserving mental processes such as attentiveness, short-term and long-term memory, learning, and problem solving. Currently, there is very little conclusive research available regarding cat cognition as standardized tests for evaluating cognitive ability are less established and less reliable than cognitive testing apparatus used in other mammalian species, like dogs. Much of what is known about feline cognition has been inferred from a combination of owner-reported behaviour, brain necropsies, and comparative cognitive neurology of related animal models. Cognition claims appear primarily on kitten diets which include elevated levels of nutrients associated with optimal brain development, although there are now diets available for senior cats that include nutrients to help slow the progression of age-related changes and prevent cognitive decline. Cognition diets for cats contain a greater portion of omega-3 fatty acids, especially docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) as well as eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and usually feature a variety of antioxidants and other supporting nutrients thought to have positive effects on cognition.
Carbon-11 choline is the basis of medical imaging technologies. Because of its involvement in biologic processes, choline is related to diseases, leading to the development of medical imaging techniques to monitor its concentration. When radiolabeled with 11CH3, choline is a useful a tracer in PET imaging. Carbon-11 is radioactive with a half-life of 20.38 minutes. By monitoring the gamma radiation resulting from the decay of carbon-11, the uptake, distribution, and retention of carbon-11 choline can be monitored.
Penny Gordon-Larsen is an obesity researcher. In July 2023, she was named Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after serving as Interim Vice Chancellor for Research from March 2022. She is the Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she served as associate dean for research from 2018 to 2022, and was also named a William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor on Sept. 1, 2023. She is also a Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center. Dr. Gordon-Larsen's NIH-funded research portfolio focuses on individual-, household-, and community-level susceptibility to obesity and its cardiometabolic consequences, and her work ranges from molecular and genetic to environmental and societal-level factors. She was the 2015 president of The Obesity Society and a member of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases Clinical Obesity Research Panel (CORP).
Folami Ideraabdullah is an American geneticist and assistant professor in the Department of Genetics and the Department of Nutrition at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ideraabdullah explores how maternal nutrition and environmental toxin exposure affect development through exploring epigenetic changes to DNA. She has found that maternal Vitamin D deficiencies can cause genome-wide changes in methylation patterns that persist for several generations and impact offspring health. Her international collaboration with the University of Witwatersrand represents the first time that metal levels in the placenta have been investigated in relation to birth outcomes in South Africa.
Eliana Perrin is an American pediatrician, researcher, and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Primary Care with joint appointments with tenure in the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine and in the School of Nursing at Johns Hopkins University. She was elected a member of the American Pediatric Society in 2021.
Nutritional epigenetics is a science that studies the effects of nutrition on gene expression and chromatin accessibility. It is a subcategory of nutritional genomics that focuses on the effects of bioactive food components on epigenetic events.
