Nutrition

For millennia, humans have been aware of the relationship between food and health. At the most basic level, even primitive peoples knew that a lack of food led to sickness or even death and that eating certain plants or animals could bring illness, while other foods could be protective or curative. This collected wisdom was passed down orally, but physicians in ancient Greece, Rome, and China began to assemble this wisdom in herbal manuscripts that were hand-copied for hundreds of years. Herbals were collections of assertions about the relationships between specific foods and health. These assertions were based on contemporary medical theories.