Nutrition Bytes was first published in 1995 by Felice Kurtzman who teaches nutrition to medical students attending the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Until 2003 Nutrition Bytes was dually published on paper and virtually online featuring the most outstanding papers written by the first year medical students. In 2005 Nutrition Bytes relocated to eScholarship as a solely electronic publication. Students are encouraged to explore a topic of personal interest or relevance. Topics of these nutrition review papers have included biochemical, psycho-social, epidemiological, clinical and public health issues of nutrition. Recently, papers have also included the use of herbs and drug-nutrient interactions.

Nutrition Bytes enhances the medical curriculum by giving the students an opportunity to survey and critically analyze nutrition research. Each year the papers have improved in quality, making the selection of the best papers increasingly difficult. In 1999, the UCLA library system catalogued and archived our printed edition of Nutrition Bytes. In 2003, the Library of Congress assigned Nutrition Bytes an ISSN.