Looking beyond calories to study the real food patterns affecting our nutrition

Chris Taylor, PhD, RD, knows what secrets are hiding in your pantry — and how they’re impacting your nutrition. As a professor of Medical Dietetics and Family Medicine, his work focuses on looking beyond the base nutrient components of foods — think calories and carbohydrates — to studying the patterns of how and what foods Americans consume.

“We eat food, not nutrients,” Taylor notes.

Taylor has spent recent years studying the food patterns of children, patients with diabetes and older adults. And what he discovered is that all three groups share a forgotten source of calories: snacking. His work points to the fact that snacking can contribute an entire meal’s worth of calories into an average diet, which has profound impacts on life-long health.