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Book Review |
Nutrition Department University of California, Davis One Shields Avenue 3135 Meyer Hall Davis, CA 95616 E-mail: rbrucker{at}ucdavis.edu
This book is a summary of a workshop held under the auspices of the European Academy of Nutritional Sciences in October 1997 and is part of the Bibliotheca Nutritio et Dieta series. This volume reviews and summarizes evidence for vitamin needs beyond classic deficiencies. The contributors, who are known leaders in the field of vitamin research, were asked to include the following information in their discussions and summaries: 1) evidence supporting increases in the current recommended dietary allowances (RDAs) of vitamins as defined by selected US and European reviewing bodies, 2) information that needs to be identified, 3) the amount of time it will take to obtain the new information, 4) strategies for communicating and marketing, and 5) health implications associated with changes in the RDAs. Despite the presumptions implied in points 3 and 4 regarding the social marking of nutritional concepts, the book focuses primarily on points 1 and 2.
The book has 20 chapters divided into 4 sections: an introduction; 2 functional sections covering the RDAs, assessment, and specific relations between vitamins; and a section that summarizes discussions from working groups at the workshop. Each section contains useful information. Alison Yates and Basil Mathiandakis provide concise summaries of the process for setting RDAs by the Food and Nutrition Board, Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences in the United States, and the Scientific Committee for Food, European Union. Subsequent chapters discuss topics such as folic acid and neural tube defects, homocysteine relations, antioxidant vitamins, mechanisms of vitamin-related antiinflammatory and immunomodulatory activities, vitamin K and osteopenia, and observations from selected interventional trials.
Each of these topics is covered concisely, albeit superficially in some instances because the chapters are primarily summaries of presentations. The summaries by Nicholas J Wald on folic acid, by Belz Frei and Mark McCall on antioxidant vitamins, and by Hans Biesalski on intervention studies are particularly useful because they provide insights beyond the personal research agendas of the authors. Regarding the summaries of the conference's working groups, nothing was articulated that has not been stated in more compelling detail elsewhere. The reader is reminded that reasonable folate, vitamin B-12, and vitamin B-6 supplementation may help prevent cardiovascular disease and neural tube defects, that antioxidant vitamins are important, and that there is emerging evidence that vitamin supplementation may play a role in behavior and cognition. However, it would have been useful to include more population-based and genetic information in the book, particularly given the objectives of the volume.
In summary, Functions of Vitamins Beyond Recommended Dietary Allowances is a concise, well-written, and edited summary of an important workshop of the European Academy of Nutritional Sciences. Accordingly, it serves an archival function and provides scholarly summaries of several new important concepts regarding the selected functions of vitamins.
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