The field of nutrition has come a long way in recent decades, a class of nearly 40 Cornell dietetics students learned from guest lecturer Elaine Ayres '75, deputy chief of the Lab for Informatics Development at the National Institutes of Health, when she visited campus April 26-27.

Ayres, who graduated from the College of Human Ecology, showed the class a thick diet manual filled with tables for looking up foods' nutritional value, an indispensable tool when she started out as a dietitian. Students examined the well-worn book, a relic in an age with thousands of health apps for mobile devices and sophisticated computer software that can count calories and analyze food content.

"Now I have a dream that I'll wave my BlackBerry over a plate of food, and it'll tell me all the details about what's on the plate," Ayres told the senior-level class, Applied Dietetics in Food Service Systems, taught by lecturer Emily Wilcox Gier '91.

At NIH and in partnership with the American Dietetic Association (ADA), Ayres is leading efforts to give rise to the field of nutrition informatics -- the use of computers, statistical analysis and other processes to create new insights from large sets of dietary and health data. The benefit for patients is improved care and the portability of their electronic health records across medical networks and state boundaries.

Ayres described how NIH warehouses hold 500 million lines of raw data, with queries taking as fast as three seconds or as long as three days to run. The challenge for informaticists is to develop tools and create standards for assessing and sharing the information and to generate findings of use to practitioners and patients.

"It is a system to organize and make sense of data and put it into a meaningful context that creates knowledge," said Ayres, who joined the NIH in 1981 as a clinical research dietitian and jokes about being a NIRD (nutrition informaticist, registered dietitian). "Nutrition informatics is becoming a basic necessity for dietitians and nutritional practitioners."

Ayres presented the students with a case study about a 10-year-old diabetic patient from Chicago visiting a nutritionist in Baltimore and explained how nutrition informatics would help to improve his care. They also heard from Lindsey Hoggle, who with Ayres co-chaired the ADA's Nutrition Informatics Work Group, about how technology will shape health care as portable electronic health records become more widespread.

"As someone who is interested in the interplay between nutrition and public health policy, it was really exciting to learn about how nutrition informatics could bridge the gap between the theory and realistic practice of widespread nutritional care," said nutrition major Yiwei Ling '10. "It was such a great learning experience, and they really instilled in us the possibility for innovation and creativity in the use of new technology in nutrition informatics."

While on campus, Ayres and Hoggle also visited with numerous faculty members and presented a seminar April 26 on nutrition and health care policy.

Ted Boscia is assistant director of communications for the College of Human Ecology.