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A young, vibrant blond raised her hand before the question had barely escaped my lips, as if she were reaching for the buzzer on a TV game show. It was always the first query of many I would ask the college students in my “Intro Nutrition 101” class during the first lecture: “What is the most important nutrition question that you expect to be answered by the end of this semester?” With an earnest expression usually indicative of the most diligent students, she asked, “Which vitamins should I be taking to be healthy?” In a sense, her question is paradoxically the easiest and toughest to answer. Textbooks and popular books are filled with descriptions of vitamins and laundry lists of their food sources. At the same time, researchers grapple with the complexities of these tiny compounds in numerous studies—most of which are trying to prove or disprove whether vitamins can do more than simply prevent vitamin deficiencies. Doing more means preventing a host of diseases that plague us. The list of diseases which scientists are now studying as having links to vitamins seems to grow longer with each edition of the daily newspaper, and usually heart disease and cancer are at the forefront. There are several reasons for these two killers heading the list: together, heart disease and cancer account for 75 percent of deaths each year in the United States, or 1.5 million people.

But college nutrition students tend to be more interested in enhancing their current health and physical performance, whether they're into bodybuilding or trying to boost their immune systems so they don't get sick, and less so with the concerns of middle age, such as high cholesterol and blood pressure. These last two problems, and a few more, such as diabetes and weight control, are the common ones that I faced along with the clients who brought them to nutrition counseling sessions. But regardless of our age and our reasons, most of us share more than a passing interest in nutrition—we share a fundamental belief that the food choices we make on a daily basis affect our health.
Some might say that this kind of thinking is a recent development, but they would be wrong. Huang Ti, the Yellow Emperor of China in the eighth century B.C.E., wrote, “Hence, if too much salt is eaten, the pulse hardens,” foreshadowing our current understanding of salt''s effect on blood pressure. Medical history shows us that the ancients from many civilizations linked various diseases to one's diet, albeit erroneously in many cases. But the fast-paced lifestyle which has come to define the so-called modern age ignored wisdom from the past in its pursuit of fast meals and quick health fixes. It probably took millions of angioplasties and coronary bypass surgeries to remind us that preventing a problem is a lot better than trying to fix the problem later. That's not to say that modern techniques such as these have not saved countless lives, but the focus on prevention will probably save lives, too, and hopefully, in a less painful and costly way. Most nutrition professionals would agree that the field hit the big time with the 1988 U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health: For the two out of three Americans who do not smoke and do not drink excessively, one personal choice seems to influence long-term health prospects more than any other: what we eat.

That statement continues to resonate into our decade, based on available scientific research, but the focus has shifted away from reducing dietary intake of constituents in foods thought to negatively impact health, such as fat, to ensuring optimal intake of others, such as antioxidant vitamins, that do the opposite. In writing this book, my hope is to provide a user-friendly approach to understanding what we know vitamins can do, and what we think they can't do, in a practical guide that helps you to put it all together at each meal. And remember one important point—one of the Japanese Dietary Guidelines says it best: “Enjoy every meal you eat.”