Leading Nutrition Text Honors Late UAB Professor

The newly published 10th edition of Modern Nutrition in Health & Disease, the leading comprehensive clinical nutrition text in the country, honors the late Roland Weinsier, M.D., a professor of nutrition sciences at UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) for 27 years.

Posted on October 13, 2005 at 1:25 p.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — The newly published 10th edition of Modern Nutrition in Health & Disease, the leading comprehensive clinical nutrition text in the country, honors the late Roland Weinsier, M.D., a professor of nutrition sciences at UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) for 27 years.

The text’s lead editor, Maurice Shils, M.D., Sc.D., had asked Weinsier to serve as the new edition’s associate editor. Weinsier recruited six current or former faculty members of the UAB Department of Nutrition Sciences to write chapters for the book, but then fell ill and passed away while the project was still in early development. Shils included a memorial to Weinsier in the completed book.

First written in 1955, Modern Nutrition in Health & Disease is considered to be the authoritative text on clinical nutrition. “It is the most exhaustive and comprehensive book on human nutrition available to medical professionals, on the magnitude of the Cecil or Harrison’s textbooks of medicine,” said Douglas Heimburger, M.D., professor of nutrition sciences at UAB and one of the chapter authors.

Other UAB faculty who contributed to the book include Sarah Morgan M.D., Christine Ritchie, M.D., Joe Baggott, Ph.D., and Gary Hunter, Ph.D. Margarita Treuth, Ph.D., a former post-doctoral student at UAB, also contributed.

Weinsier joined the UAB faculty in 1975 as director of the division of clinical nutrition, following service in the U.S. Air Force and medical education at the Universities of Florida and Virginia. His research into the relationship between food intake and physical activity led to new understanding of the causes of obesity and associated medical conditions.

Weinsier served as chair of the UAB Department of Nutrition Sciences from 1988 to 1999, and in 2000 was awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a clinical nutrition research unit on campus. He died in November 2002.

The 10th edition of Modern Nutrition in Health & Disease includes information on nutrition’s role in disease prevention, international nutrition issues, public health concerns, the role of obesity in a variety of chronic illnesses, genetics as it applies to nutrition, and areas of major scientific progress relating nutrition to disease. It is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.