The application of nutritional science to clinical practice.

Nutritional science consists of multiple overlapping disciplines: agricultural science including animal husbandry; food science; public health; nutritional physiology; and therapeutic or clinical nutrition. The application of nutritional science to clinical practice has undoubtedly resulted in improved survival and improved quality of life in certain groups of patients. It has also resulted in new concepts that are not only of fundamental importance to physiology and human biology, but also to the development of new therapeutic strategies. Several of these new concepts have arisen from three interrelated areas that are essentially unique to human and veterinary clinical nutrition. These are: (1) the consequences of bypassing the gut, which occurs during intravenous nutrition; (2) the effects of administering nutrients in quantities and proportions that are not normally possible with normal diets; (3) the effects of using continuous feeding over 24 h rather than intermittent feeding.