NATS 1560 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Nutrition, Reductionism, Food Science
17 Feb 2017
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Document Summary
Modern science is: materialist, reductionist, experimental; Science: systematic study to obtain knowledge about the natural world, and the knowledge so produced. Technology: manipulation of nature for practical purposes. Techno-scientific controversies around food: technical, social, political, ethical issues. Nutrition science and food science is reductionist: this is because they aim to explain complex phenomena of the body and its relation to food by reducing them to molecular processes. Compound: substance whose molecules are composed of atoms of different elements. Mixture: substance containing different kinds of molecules. Molecular formulas: symbolic expression representing the species and numbers of atoms in a molecule. Covalent: when two atoms share a pair of electrons. Chemical reaction: re-arrangement of the atoms of the reactants into new molecules. Catalyst: a substance that facilitates the reaction but is not changed by the reaction. Isomers: molecules having the same chemical composition, but different structures. The same substance can exist in different states of matter, or phases.
