Editorial Immunonutrition in Early Life: Diet and Immune Development

Copyright © 2012 Francisco J. Pérez-Cano et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1. Origins of Immunonutrition The belief that “you are what you eat ” originated from Brillat-Savarin et al. (“tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are”) in the 1800s [1] was the starting point in the quest to understand the role of diet in almost every function in the body and in overall health. However, prior to the 1950s, there was little recognition of the relationship between nutrition and immune function. Scrimshaw and colleagues first described the bidirectional interaction between nutrition and infection [2]. This initial link between malnutrition and infective diseases has since evolved; not only do we now consider that diet is critica