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This textbook follows in the tradition of its predecessor, "Davidson’s Human Nutrition and Dietetics," which was edited by Passmore and Eastwood. In this second edition of Principles of Human Nutrition, Eastwood obviously used input from readers of the first edition to reorganize the text as well to update referenced material.
The 47 chapters of text are organized into 7 parts: "Factors Influencing the Food That a Community Eats"; "Calculating How Much Food a Community Eats"; "Factors Influencing How an Individual Metabolises Nutrients"; "Calculating the Nutritional Status of an Individual"; "Nutrients and non-nutrients" (11 chapters); "Eating, Digestion and Metabolism" (19 chapters); and "Special Nutritional Requirements and Conditions." The chapters contain a stylized overview of the enumerated contents, an introduction, narrative, figures, tables, and boxes that emphasize key points. All chapters conclude with a list of key points, thinking points, and an alphabetic list of further reading.
The format provides a lucid, concise presentation of the material encompassed. The book allows for appropriate repetition for emphasis, which makes for information that is easily accessible. The reader might consider collecting the key points from each chapter to compile a neat set of reference notes. The reference material provided includes appropriate websites; however, the publisher’s website provides little assistance in updating information and sources. The figures and tables included in the book are almost entirely original and generally are easily perused. Although the book’s material is broad-based and appropriate to an international readership, it would have been useful if Eastwood had appended a list of "translations" in American English for readers outside the United Kingdom.
The book contains a modest number of typographical errors that the author and publisher should correct before the next printing. Also, a few cross-references to figures and tables are mismatched. Otherwise, the book was a pleasure to read and to learn from and should provide much useful and interesting information to nutrition students from a wide variety of disciplines. This book certainly belongs in departmental and university libraries, and I recommended it highly.
The most appealing chapters are chapter 6 ("Nutritional Epidemiology"), chapter 7 ("Genetics"), chapter 8 ("Evaluation of Dietary Intake"), chapter 26 ("Protein Absorption"), chapter 39 ("Organ Metabolic Fuel Selection"), and chapter 40 ("Growth"). The least appealing chapters, which should have been more comprehensive and more current, are chapter 18 ("Water, Electrolytes, Minerals and Trace Elements"), chapter 31 ("Cytochrome P450"), and chapter 36 ("Cholesterol and Lipoproteins"). It would be especially rewarding if Eastwood, in the next edition, would expand the relatively meager attention he paid to the relation between nutrition and disease in the current edition. Given his clinical background, experience, and gift for writing, this task should be easily accomplished.