Epidemiological insights on malnutrition: some resurrected, others restructured, a few retired.

In its modern sense, epidemiology has progressed from a classical concern of causality as expressed within biological limits to recognition that a variety of social factors have proportionate significance in the origin and behavior of human nutritional disorders. Basically an analytical process, nutritional epidemiology has grown to include, among objectives for prevention and control, a synthesis of plans for intervention; the monitoring of action programs introduced; and again a parallel analytic mission to evaluate such accomplishments as programs bring forth. Nutritional epidemiology, so employed, becomes a general scientific discipline, widely purposed and incorporating objectives beyond public health: measures concerned with social welfare, economic growth, political stability, and behavioral compatibility with fellow humans and other living things. Specifically, nutritional epidemiology comprises a branch of knowledge utilizing human ecology to solve problems in three broad dimensions--a defined causality, a prescribed intervention (planning, operations) and an evaluation of results, concurrently made and terminally. The groundwork is medical ecology, the approach holistic. A population of pregnant mothers and their newborn children is accorded first priority among fields of interest, past any single disease entity or technical method of control. Community programs enlarge from that base.