Boston University School of Medicine has established a series of Medical Education Programs in Nutrition held each summer since 1975. These deal with controversies in human clinical nutrition. The subjects have covered various topics, including those dealing with the relation- ships between diet and heart disease, diet and cancer, breast* versus bottle-feeding, and dietary fiber and disease. Other noncontroversial topics were also covered at these conferences; they were discussed simply to bring to the attention of the health professional new happenings in nutritional research. These topics dealt with the relationships of nutrition to immune function, to neurotransmitters, to infection, to obesity, and to chemotherapy. This text is a compilation of selected manuscripts of interest to the health professional in the area of human clinical nutrition. Whatever success this text enjoys is in no small way due to the ad- ministrative and editorial efforts of our administrative assistant, Mrs Geraldine Rankin - our sincere thanks.