Doctors N Health Land

In some cultures around the world where food isn’t so plentiful, children can become malnourished and develop diseases such as Kwashiorkor. The children have the distended tummies,however the rest of their bodies are fine, this unfortunately is caused by a protein deficiency. Scientists can actually measure the quality of nutrients that people are getting.

People will volunteer to be involved in a clinical feeding trial and they will hook these people up to all kinds of measuring devices to measure everything from body temperature to how much moisture they exhale. They weigh and eliminate brine in their feces and record everything they can about these patients. They will feed these people a controlled diet – controlling the amount of protein consumed. They can measure how much is excreted, how much weight a person gains and basically they can determine how much of that protein is utilized by the body. When they do that they can determine the quality of the protein and the amino acids that makes up the protein. They can determine how well the body absorbs protein and assign anumber value to the protein as to how well it is absorbed.