Frank B. Hu

Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Principal investigator on the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, from which much of the current cardiovascular and diabetic epidemiology of diet is drawn.

Why he matters here

Hu represents the center of gravity of the mainstream nutritional epidemiology this resource does not oppose but does situate: population-level dietary patterns, established in large cohorts, do give a first-order account of chronic disease burden, and yet they do not, and cannot, tell an individual patient whether her own tissue magnesium or her own 25(OH)D concentration lies in a range compatible with mitochondrial or immune health. The two levels of description are complementary, and it is the second that this resource insists is missing.