[Dietetics principles. The food pyramid. Disease-nutrition relationship]

Dietetics is a largely unknown discipline among medical professionals as it is not common for them to receive any training in the matter. Nonetheless, this group very often needs to give dietary counselling and even to draw up diets for patients, more often indeed than nutrition specialists. This paper attempts to review some of the basic concepts of dietetics and study in a general way the relationship between illness and nutritional status without going into too much detail as many of the points mentioned here are referred to more fully in other articles in the same monograph.