Valuable additional resources that contain reliable information about nutrition are available at the British Nutrition Foundation, Medline Plus, Harvard Nutrition Source and Nutrition.gov. For advanced students, the use of Pubmed is recommended. Pubmed is a public database for the scientific literature in the fields of biomedicine and health that also covers portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences and bioengineering. PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institute of Health (NIH). When using PubMed and other databases, the inclusion of search terms such as “review” and “meta-analysis” is recommended. These are the terms used for certain types of articles that provide a broad overview of a topic. For instance, if you are interested in overview articles about the relation between dietary fiber and colon cancer, enter the search terms “colon cancer” (or “colorectal cancer”), “dietary fiber” (or “dietary fibre”) and “meta-analysis” or “review” using the advanced search tool in PubMed.
Information about the nutrient content of foods is available from the USDA and through Eurofir. Many countries have their own website that provides information on food composition. The website used in the Netherlands can be found here.