IFT Live 2012

by Kelly Frederick

For the First Annual Gilbert A. Leveille Lectureship Recognizing Contributions at the Interface of Food Science & Nutrition, the speaker was, in fact, Gilbert Leveille. On Sunday, July 18, in McCormick Place, Leveille, Director Emeritus at Wrigley Science Institute, shared his desire to see nutrition and food science come together with his speech on “Food Science & Nutrition: A Journey Toward Health & Wellness.”

Leveille began by taking a look at both food science/technology and nutrition and their respective evolution throughout history. As he explained, the development of food science didn’t really get its start until the 1920s, and since then it has developed rapidly.  As he sees it, 1944 to 1965 was really the heyday of the food industry when convenience and new food products abounded. It wasn’t really until the late 1960s that nutrition and food safety came into the picture with the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health in 1969. While food science didn’t hit its stride until the early 20th century, it was being pioneered back in the early 19th century with pioneers such as Nicholas Appert and Louis Pasteur, who introduced canning and microbial control to the world of food. Leveille continued by listing some of the major pioneers in food science throughout the rest of the 19th and 20th centuries, including William Cruess, Carl Fellers, Samuel Cate Prescott, Stephen Babcock, Clarence Birdseye, Harvey Wiley, and Bernard Oser.

Shifting to the history of nutrition, Leveille noted that it really took hold in the late 19th century—the era of chemistry, in which there were advances in understanding of macronutrients and physiology of energy. The early 20th century was the heyday of nutrition, also known as the “vitamin era,” due to the discovery of numerous essential nutrients. The late 20th century saw the evolution of “new nutrition” and the birth of functional foods. Antoine Lavoisier—the “father of nutrition and modern chemistry”—really pioneered the field in the late 18th century when he started measuring what people ate and what effect the foods had on them. Justus Leibig continued the work in the early 19th century by delving into the chemical composition of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Other pioneers in the field, such as Wilbur Atwater, who explored the idea of metabolism, and Casimir Funk, who first termed substances as “vitamins,” helped to bring nutrition into the age of “new nutrition.”

Although the fields of food science and nutrition evolved somewhat separately, they have started to cross over, although Leveille believes “there is still a long way to go.” Adding health attributes to the food supply began with endeavors such as iodized salt to treat goiters and vitamin D fortification of milk to prevent rickets. However, as Leveille explained, there exists a “gray zone” in between food science and nutrition, in which exists taste, delivery forms for nutrients, and elimination of undesirable substances. “We’ve had forays into the ‘gray zone,’ but we have never lived there,” said Leveille. “And it is going to require the two teams to really collaborate in a functional team way to really make progress.”

Leveille ended his lecture with a question concerning the future of nutrition and food science. “Will nutrigenomics be the food industry’s next major opportunity?” asked Leveille. While we don’t have the answers today, it is certainly a movement that could change the face of both food science and nutrition.