Background:

Nutrition has a fascinating history, understanding it allows us to grasp its origins and the evolution of the knowledge that supports it. This article is a review of the experimental procedures, results, and conclusions that facilitated the birth of the science of nutrition and the discovery of organic nutrients.

Objective:

To describe the early experimental designs of the discovery of nutrition and organic nutrients through a narrative review.

Material and Methods:

Literature review in scientific texts, using English MeSH terms related to the first experiments published by the authors credited with the discovery of nutrition and organic nutrients.

Results:

Lavoisier found similarities between the combustion of metals and animal respiration, which forms the basis of metabolism. Nutrients were discovered using yeast and rodents as experimental models, which were subjected to restriction diets to then identify, by process of elimination, a new nutrient responsible for deficiency diseases or associated with growth delays.

Conclusions:

Nutrition is a recent science and still under construction of new knowledge, so the experimental designs described here may be useful for motivating the discovery of new functions of recognized nutrients and new molecules that may be classified as nutrients.

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