Nutritional science in the context of "Dietary fat"

Nutrition is the biochemical and physiological process by which an organism uses food and water to support its life. The intake of these substances provides organisms with nutrients (divided into macro- and micro-) which can be metabolized to create energy and chemical structures; too much or too little of an essential nutrient can cause malnutrition. Nutritional science, the study of nutrition as a hard science, typically emphasizes human nutrition.

The type of organism determines what nutrients it needs and how it obtains them. Organisms obtain nutrients by consuming organic matter, consuming inorganic matter, absorbing light, or some combination of these. Some can produce nutrients internally by consuming basic elements, while others must consume other organisms to obtain pre-existing nutrients. All forms of life require carbon, energy, and water as well as various other molecules. Animals require complex nutrients such as carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins, obtaining them by consuming other organisms. Humans have developed agriculture and cooking to replace foraging and advance human nutrition. Plants acquire nutrients through the soil and the atmosphere. Fungi absorb nutrients around them by breaking them down and absorbing them through the mycelium.

Food science (or bromatology) is the basic science and applied science of food; its scope starts at overlap with agricultural science and nutritional science and leads through the scientific aspects of food safety and food processing, informing the development of food technology.

Food science brings together multiple scientific disciplines. It incorporates concepts from fields such as chemistry, physics, physiology, microbiology, and biochemistry. Food technology incorporates concepts from chemical engineering, for example.

In nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food.

The term often refers specifically to triglycerides (triple esters of glycerol), that are the main components of vegetable oils and of fatty tissue in animals; or, even more narrowly, to triglycerides that are solid or semisolid at room temperature, thus excluding oils. The term may also be used more broadly as a synonym of lipid—any substance of biological relevance, composed of carbon, hydrogen, or oxygen, that is insoluble in water but soluble in non-polar solvents. In this sense, besides the triglycerides, the term would include several other types of compounds like mono- and diglycerides, phospholipids (such as lecithin), sterols (such as cholesterol), waxes (such as beeswax), and free fatty acids, which are usually present in human diet in smaller amounts.

Analytical chemistry (or chemical analysis) is the branch of chemistry concerned with the development and application of methods to identify the chemical composition of materials and quantify the amounts of components in mixtures. It focuses on methods to identify unknown compounds, possibly in a mixture or solution, and quantify a compound's presence in terms of amount of substance (in any phase), concentration (in aqueous or solution phase), percentage by mass or number of moles in a mixture of compounds (or partial pressure in the case of gas phase).

It encompasses both classical techniques (e.g. titration, gravimetric analysis) and modern instrumental approaches (e.g. spectroscopy, chromatography, mass spectrometry, electrochemical methods). Modern analytical chemistry is deeply intertwined with data analysis and chemometrics, and is increasingly shaped by trends such as automation, miniaturization, and real-time sensing, with applications across fields as diverse as biochemistry, medicinal chemistry, forensic science, archaeology, nutritional science, agricultural chemistry, chemical synthesis, metallurgy, chemical engineering and materials science.