Research in Clinical Nutrition in Brazil

This essay intends to make a first approach to Clinical Nutrition research. We consider the gap that exists between information and debates about epistemological elements and about interests that mark this activity inside the scientific Field of Food and Nutrition in Brazil. The multidimensional character of the food-nutrition field is presented with its strong brand identity and motive of distinction. However, research in Clinical Nutrition is characterized by the biomedical perspective that focuses emphatically on metabolism and disease, excluding the social relationships and intersubjectivity of the studies that centre on nutrition and ignore food. The relief from suffering requires understanding interpersonal relationships in society. Both from the methodological and epistemological viewpoints, biomedicine is not capable of encompassing the entirety of the human life phenomenon. For these reasons, Human and Social Sciences can provide an interdisciplinary contribution to the Field of Food and Nutrition, in the sense of instrumenting innovative studies conceptually and methodologically. Such perspectives can bring to light the subjective dimensions of human illness that correspond to the essential subject of study for Clinical Nutrition.