American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 84, No. 6, 1556,
December 2006
© 2006 American Society for Nutrition
Textbook on Nutrition and AIDS
3rd ed, edited by R Polo, 2002, 735 pages, hardcover. NILO Industria Grafica, Madrid, Spain.
Lars Berglund
Department of Medicine
University of California Davis Medical Center
CRISP
2921 Stockton Boulevard
Suite 14
Sacramento, CA 95817
E-mail: lars.berglund{at}ucdmc.ucdavis.edu
This is the third edition of a review on nutrition and AIDS, and 47 authors, largely based in Spain, contributed to the book’s 32 chapters. The book is divided into 3 sections. The first section focuses on nutrition and HIV infection; the second section addresses prevention, diets, and nutritional treatments; and the third section discusses the complications of antiretroviral therapy. The book also has an appendix, which contains useful data on body composition, food composition, and vitamins. Despite the large range of subjects covered in this book, the presentation is consistent, and the text is presented in a reader-friendly format. The information provided is generally of high quality, and the references are current.
The first section presents data on malnutrition in AIDS. The first chapter of this section is authored by the editor and provides a nice historical perspective on nutritional issues in AIDS patients. The following chapters address malnutrition and wasting in AIDS; the effect of endocrine, metabolic, and gastrointestinal disorders on nutrition; an overview of the nutritional effect on immune function; and nutritional management in children. The second section consists of a comprehensive overview of practical nutrition therapy in HIV-positive patients and contains a very useful collection of practical guidelines for a variety of nutritional challenges and covers appetite stimulants and drug-nutrition interactions. The third section of the book is devoted to the metabolic complications associated with antiretroviral therapy—a timely and developing area and the major thrust of the book. This section consists of several chapters, and in some cases the information provided is repetitive. However, this repetitiveness does not necessarily detract from the overall positive impression of the book. Furthermore, various viewpoints concerning the underlying mechanisms of these metabolic complications are articulated by the different authors of this section, which is of benefit to the reader. For example, different aspects of the effects of nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors on mitochondrial function are discussed by the different authors of the many chapters of this section, providing a comprehensive and largely unbiased overview of the topic for the reader. Although virtually all of the chapters in the book are of high quality, the chapter on antiretroviral therapy–associated lipodystrophy, authored by Nolan, John, Martinez, and Mallal, is particularly exhaustive and a valuable source of current information.
Overall, this book is easy to read, and the text is uniformly of high quality. Because this is the third edition, the authors were able to build on a solid base, and the end result is quite impressive. Without hesitation, I recommend this book to any reader interested in a broad overview of nutrition, metabolic complications, and AIDS.
