Features: Food for the 21st Century

Safety Matters
5 SPH experts weigh in on whether we can trust what we eat and drink.

Crisis Management
A sudden tidal wave of need means new challenges for Food Gatherers, one of the country's oldest food-rescue agencies.

Type 2 Diabetes: Anatomy of a Disease
Click to in-depth descriptions of 15 SPH research projects tackling the problems of type 2 diabetes or obesity.

Adventures in Cyber-Dining
One woman's lighthearted look at not-so-forbidden fruits (and vegetables!)

Test Your Food IQ!
With 10 questions sourced from these pages and the food world beyond.

Food shapes our days and powers our dreams. It’s a source of health and well-being as well as a meta-phorical channel for love and pain. It brings us together in unforgettable ways: around campfires, under trees, inside kitchens and coffee shops, on blankets and boats and trains. We turn to food when we need to celebrate or grieve, when we have business to conduct or friends to entertain, when a loved one is preparing to leave home and when that loved one comes safely back. Across the globe, we define ourselves by what and when, how and where we eat. Our relationship with food is primal and, as these pages show, increasingly fraught. In parts of the world we eat too much, in much of the world too little. Many of the foods we eat are harmful to us—harmful too, research shows, to our unborn children. Our predilection for fast, cheap food has led to agricultural practices that are damaging the environment (as well as our hearts). Our addiction to fossil fuels is poisoning the waters from which we derive our fish and the soil in which we grow the fruits and vegetables and grains that are so essential to our health. We can’t stop eating, of course, but we can change the way we eat and the way we grow and distribute food. We can change our attitudes about what food is and how it should be consumed. Some people are there already. Read on, and you’ll see why.

SPH's Evolving Human Nutrition Program

Things are cooking these days at the School of Public Health Human Nutrition Program. Under the direction of Environmental Health Sciences Professor Karen E. Peterson, the program now has five full-time faculty members, two adjunct lecturers, and a research professor with a joint appointment in the Medical School. A newly revised master’s-degree curriculum incorporates emerging research on issues like obesity, micronutrients, and epigenetics—and Peterson and her colleagues are developing a new doctoral program with intermediate-to-advanced-level courses in the program’s three key areas of research expertise: nutrition as a modifier of adverse environmental exposures across the life cycle; nutrition and immunofunction; and nutrition, obesity, and chronic disease. A newly expanded dietetic internship (directed by Theresa Han Markey, bionutrition manager for the Michigan Clinical Research Unit at the University of Michigan Health System) offers training in both medical nutrition therapy and community nutrition.

Eugene Yen (pictured at top left above with local schoolchildren of the Agrarian Adventure) is one of 31 master’s level students who enrolled in the Human Nutrition Program last year. He says he’s convinced the program is the best of its kind in the country. “It’s really unique. You can get an MPH, plus become a registered dietitian. There aren’t many other programs in the country that allow you to do that in just over two years.”

Graduates of the SPH Human Nutrition Program can be found at:

U.S. Department of Agriculture
Michigan Department of Community Health
NSF International
Blue Cross Blue Shield
Major food industries
Major research universities and organizations
Medical schools
Nonprofit agencies
Local, state, and federal agencies
Hospitals and outpatient clinics