HEALTHY EATING
Precision Nutrition:
"Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food." – Hippocrates
The Merger of Nutrition and Medicine By Tim Hlavinka, MD
It was the Spring semester of 1979 and I needed another "hard science" class to fulfill medical school application requirements. I’d had enough of Organic and Biochem for one pre-med lifetime, so I perused the class handbook and stopped at Nutrition Science 101. Why not? It qualified and I wanted to learn about nutrition, as my career plan at that time was to become a pediatric surgeon. I thoroughly enjoyed learning about calorie requirements and vitamins and minerals and
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SAN ANTONIO MEDICINE • May 2021
their physiology and impact on metabolism. Nutritional therapy at that time was directed toward easily phenotyped diseases such as phenylketonuria, or classic deficiency states such as pernicious anemia. It was fortuitous to have that background knowledge in med school as I went through Biochem and Pharmacology. In residency, nutritional advances such as TPN and enteral feedings were being developed and I tackled those with alacrity. Physicians' approach to nutrition seemed to
stop at disease states and not approach healthy eating and a healthy lifestyle. I propose that nutritional and dietary advice should be incorporated into all of our therapeutic interventions—this is not the future but the present. The concept of Precision Nutrition has been coined to designate the use of personalized nutritional approaches for prevention and management of disease. The discipline is in its infancy. Much work remains to create an integrated, interdisciplinary framework that in-
