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Steven H. Zeisel is an American academic. He is the Kenan Distinguished University Professor in Nutrition and Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Steven H. Zeisel is an American academic. He is the Kenan Distinguished University Professor in Nutrition and Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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.
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 to 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 ( KOH-leen) is an essential nutrient for humans and many other animals, which was formerly classified as a B vitamin (vitamin B4). It is a structural part of phospholipids and a methyl donor in metabolic one-carbon chemistry. The compound is related to trimethylglycine in the latter respect. It is a cation with the chemical formula [(CH3)3NCH2CH2OH]+. Choline forms various salts, for example choline chloride and choline bitartrate.
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; some contain sulfur and B12 contains cobalt. Dietary supplements containing all eight are referred to as a vitamin B complex. Individual B vitamins are referred to by B-number or by chemical name, such as B1 for thiamine, B2 for riboflavin, and B3 for niacin, while some are more commonly recognized by name than by number, such as pantothenic acid (B5), biotin (B7), and folate (B9).
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.
Trimethylaminuria (TMAU), also known as fish odor syndrome or fish malodor syndrome, is a rare metabolic disorder that causes a defect in the normal production of an enzyme named flavin-containing monooxygenase 3 (FMO3). When FMO3 is not working correctly or if not enough enzyme is produced, the body loses the ability to properly convert the fishy-smelling chemical trimethylamine (TMA) from precursor compounds in food digestion into trimethylamine oxide (TMAO), through a process called N-oxidation.
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.
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.
Barry Michael Popkin is an American nutrition and obesity researcher at the Carolina Population Center and the W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, where he is the director of the Global Food Research Program. He developed the concept of "nutrition transition". He is the author of over 650 journal articles and a book, The World is Fat, translated into a dozen languages.
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.
Giselle Corbie-Smith is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. She serves as Director of the UNC Center for Health Equity Research and Associate Provost of the Institute of Rural Innovation. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2018. Her research considers racial disparities in healthcare.
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.
Hans W. Paerl is a Dutch American limnologist and a Kenan Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) Institute of Marine Sciences. His research primarily assesses microbially-mediated nutrient cycling, primary production dynamics, and the consequences of human impacts on water quality and sustainability in waters around the world.
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.
