polarisera boosted your post 🙈 🙉 🙊 on Nostr: @TheAttagirls: Woman of the Day nutritionist and dietician Dr Elsie Widdowson born in ...
@TheAttagirls:
Woman of the Day nutritionist and dietician Dr Elsie Widdowson born in 1906 in Surrey. It’s her day because OTD in 1940, rationing was introduced on butter, bacon, ham, and sugar, and by 11 March this was expanded to all meat.
When the government needed to know if the UK could survive on homegrown food if German U-boats stopped all food from entering British waters during the war, Elsie and her colleague Professor Robert McCance provided the answers in their top-secret experiment, the Cambridge Study.
In December 1939, Elsie and a small group of volunteers lived solely on restricted rations - one egg per week, 450g meat, a tiny amount of fish and milk and margarine, unlimited amounts of potatoes, vegetables and wholemeal bread. They took intensive outdoor exercise to replicate the strenuous physical work ordinary Britons would be likely to carry out as part of the national war effort.
As wartime rationing began to bite, Elsie worked out that bread, green vegetables, and potatoes contained all the nutrients needed for healthy survival.
“You can, if you have to, live on a very simple diet.”
She and the volunteers went the extra mile and voluntarily tested what amounted to a starvation diet for months - nothing more than bread, cabbage and potatoes. “We did not believe that we should use human subjects in experiments that involved any pain, hardship or danger, unless we had made the same experiments on ourselves.”
Rationing never did get quite as severe as that but they were testing out an extreme.
They advocated for bread to be fortified by vitamins and minerals, particularly calcium, and their findings became the basis of the wartime rationing system. Elsie was especially worried about the nutritional needs of babies and factored those in at every opportunity.
Some foods were not rationed during the war - fruit, veg, bread, fish and alcohol - but there were only ever limited amounts available because some foods were not native to the UK and had to be imported at great personal cost to the men of the Merchant Navy on the Atlantic Convoys.
Whale meat and tinned snoek (a type of fish) were freely available but for some reason, didn’t fly off the shelves. Loo rolls were available but only the crispy kind (soft toilet paper wasn’t invented until 1942 and it was expensive). People used squares of newspaper instead; something the Sydney Morning Herald thoughtfully accommodated when it published its print editions with a couple of blank pages on the inside during the bleakest days of Australia’s Covid 19 lockdown in 2020.
Although the Cambridge Study remained top secret until after WW2, it was directly responsible for improving the health of the British people. Infant mortality declined. Life expectancy - outside of war-related deaths - actually rose because for the first time, everyone in the general population had access to a carefully calibrated diet with sufficient vitamins and minerals.
Elsie was instrumental in providing that benefit to the public. She died in 2000, aged 93.
https://x.com/TheAttagirls/status/1876894869827842101
Woman of the Day nutritionist and dietician Dr Elsie Widdowson born in 1906 in Surrey. It’s her day because OTD in 1940, rationing was introduced on butter, bacon, ham, and sugar, and by 11 March this was expanded to all meat.
When the government needed to know if the UK could survive on homegrown food if German U-boats stopped all food from entering British waters during the war, Elsie and her colleague Professor Robert McCance provided the answers in their top-secret experiment, the Cambridge Study.
In December 1939, Elsie and a small group of volunteers lived solely on restricted rations - one egg per week, 450g meat, a tiny amount of fish and milk and margarine, unlimited amounts of potatoes, vegetables and wholemeal bread. They took intensive outdoor exercise to replicate the strenuous physical work ordinary Britons would be likely to carry out as part of the national war effort.
As wartime rationing began to bite, Elsie worked out that bread, green vegetables, and potatoes contained all the nutrients needed for healthy survival.
“You can, if you have to, live on a very simple diet.”
She and the volunteers went the extra mile and voluntarily tested what amounted to a starvation diet for months - nothing more than bread, cabbage and potatoes. “We did not believe that we should use human subjects in experiments that involved any pain, hardship or danger, unless we had made the same experiments on ourselves.”
Rationing never did get quite as severe as that but they were testing out an extreme.
They advocated for bread to be fortified by vitamins and minerals, particularly calcium, and their findings became the basis of the wartime rationing system. Elsie was especially worried about the nutritional needs of babies and factored those in at every opportunity.
Some foods were not rationed during the war - fruit, veg, bread, fish and alcohol - but there were only ever limited amounts available because some foods were not native to the UK and had to be imported at great personal cost to the men of the Merchant Navy on the Atlantic Convoys.
Whale meat and tinned snoek (a type of fish) were freely available but for some reason, didn’t fly off the shelves. Loo rolls were available but only the crispy kind (soft toilet paper wasn’t invented until 1942 and it was expensive). People used squares of newspaper instead; something the Sydney Morning Herald thoughtfully accommodated when it published its print editions with a couple of blank pages on the inside during the bleakest days of Australia’s Covid 19 lockdown in 2020.
Although the Cambridge Study remained top secret until after WW2, it was directly responsible for improving the health of the British people. Infant mortality declined. Life expectancy - outside of war-related deaths - actually rose because for the first time, everyone in the general population had access to a carefully calibrated diet with sufficient vitamins and minerals.
Elsie was instrumental in providing that benefit to the public. She died in 2000, aged 93.
https://x.com/TheAttagirls/status/1876894869827842101