Elsie Widdowson

Bronze bust of Elsie Widdowson, made in 1974 by Margo Bulman

Elsie May Widdowson CH CBE FRS (born October 21, 1906 in Wallington , London ; died June 14, 2000 in Cambridge ) was a British chemist and nutritionist . Together with her long-time research partner Robert McCance , she worked on the British food rationing program during World War II .

life and career

Elsie Widdowson grew up in London during the First World War . Her younger sister was a nuclear physicist , but Eva Crane was a scientist who was particularly known for bee research .

Widdowson studied chemistry at Imperial College London , where she received her bachelor's degree in 1928 after two years of study. After graduating, she worked with Helen Porter . She received her doctorate in 1931 with her work on the carbohydrate content of apples at Imperial College and at the Courtauld Institute of Biochemistry under Charles Dodds with a thesis on the metabolism of the kidneys. In 1976 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1993 she became a Companion of Honor .

Widdowson's specialty was the scientific analysis of food, nutrition, and the relationship between pre- and postpartum nutrition and its effects on development. With research on the effects of maternal nutrition around childbirth on the development of children, she laid the foundation for the composition of breast milk substitutes in the 1980s.

In 1933 she entered into a 60-year research partnership with Professor Robert McCance. Together they examined the nutritional values of thousands of foods. Their shared realization that contemporary nutrition tables were essentially wrong cemented an extremely creative partnership. They recorded their results in The Chemical Composition of Foods , first published in 1940 . They revolutionized the way nutrition was assessed, how malnutrition problems were studied, and how mammalian development was perceived.

Widdowson was best known for her research into nutritional problems, malnutrition and food rationing in Britain during World War II. In particular, she experimented with minimal diets. McCance and Widdowson showed that health could be maintained for long periods of time through a diet so minimal that others believed that starvation and malnutrition were inevitable. The weekly ration they suggested was only one egg, one pound of meat or fish, six ounces of fruit, five ounces of cheese, and four ounces of fat. Whole grain bread, vegetables and potatoes were not rationed and a quarter of a pint of milk was allowed daily. In order to prove that one can survive healthily on this diet, Widdowson, McCance, and other colleagues strictly adhered to the plan for three months; their diet consisted mainly of bread, cabbage and potatoes. To prove the feasibility even in more difficult, physically demanding conditions, at the end of 1939 they embarked on a ten-day, fast hike including climbing, during which they almost only ate bread.

During the war, further experiments on bread followed, in particular whether wholemeal bread could reduce the calcium deficiency of the British population who preferred white bread. As a result of these studies, calcium is still added to bread in the UK to this day. Later research led them to advocate fortifying foods with iron and vitamins as well.

Widdowson was consulted on the question of what kind of diet should be used to remedy the effects of hunger and malnutrition among the victims of the National Socialist concentration camps . She later examined the effects of different types of bread on the recovery rates of malnourished children in Germany.

Widdowson's mineral injections in self-experiment

She shared McCance's enthusiasm for self-experimentation. They began by investigating how the body deals with saving (absorption and excretion) of minerals. They injected themselves with large amounts of iron intravenously to get the body to excrete iron. After that wasn't enough for them, they injected themselves with several other minerals at the same time. In 1938, they nearly died from one of those self-experiments in which they injected themselves with strontium lactate to see how they would excrete it.

Widdowson spent most of her working life in Cambridge, where she stayed until 1972. She worked in the department for experimental (later research) medicine of the Medical Research Council and in the Dunn Human Nutrition Unit there .

She was President of the Nutrition Society (1977-80), the Neonatal Society (1978-81) and the British Nutrition Foundation (1986-96) and was elected to the Royal Society in 1976. Widdowson was named Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1979 and Companion of Honor in 1993. In 1999, the Elsie Widdowson Laboratory for Human Nutrition Research was inaugurated in Cambridge.

In 1993, the British Nutrition Foundation published McCance & Widdowson in honor of the longstanding collaboration between Widdowson and McCance . A Scientific Partnership of 60 Years, 1933-1993 .

Elsie Widdowson lived in Barrington, near Cambridge, for over 50 years. She died in 2000 after suffering a stroke while on vacation in Ireland with her sister at Addenbrooke's Hospital. She was never married. In the Antarctic, the Widdowson Glacier has been bearing her name since 1959 and the Widdowson Cove since 2016 .

Works (selection)

• Elsie Widdowson, Robert McCance: The Chemical Composition of Foods . Medical Research Council Special Report Series, London 1940.
• Elsie Widdowson, Robert McCance: Composition of Foods (Special Report Series) . 3. Edition. Stationery Office Books, 1960, ISBN 0-11-450005-3 .
• Elsie Widdowson, Robert McCance: Calorie Deficiencies and Protein Deficiencies . Little Brown and Company, 1968, ISBN 0-7000-1362-8 .
• Elsie Widdowson: Feeding the Newborn Mammal (Biological Readers) . Carolina Biological Supply Co, 1981, ISBN 0-89278-312-5 .
• Elsie Widdowson: Foraging Strategies and Natural Diet of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans: Proceedings of a Royal Society Discussion Meeting Held on 30 and 31 May 1991 . Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-19-852255-3 .
• Elsie Widdowson, John Mathers: The Contribution of Nutrition to Human and Animal Health . Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-521-42064-4 .
• Elsie Widdowson, Robert McCance: Vegetable Dishes: Second Supplement to Composition of Foods . 2nd Edition. The Royal Society Of Chemistry, 1996, ISBN 0-85186-396-5 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Margaret Ashwell: Elsie May Widdowson, CH 21 October 1906 - 14 June 2000 . In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society . tape 48 , 2002, pp. 483-506 , doi : 10.1098 / rsbm.2002.0028 .
2. ^ ^{A b c} biography of Elsie Widdowson. In: Britannica. Retrieved October 8, 2019 . 
3. ^ ^{A b c d e} Margaret Ashwell: Elsie May Widdowson . In: Royal College of Physicians (Ed.): Munks Roll - Lives of the Fellows . tape XII , January 25, 2011 ( rcplondon.ac.uk [accessed October 8, 2019]).
4. ↑ ^{a b} Most influential women in British science history. In: The Royal Society. March 13, 2019, accessed October 8, 2019 . 
5. ^ ^{A b c} Anthony Tucker: Elsie Widdowson: Food expert who studied dietary deprivation and changed the way nutritional tables are created. In: The Guardian. June 22, 2000, accessed October 9, 2019 . 
6. ^ ^{A b} Alison A. Paul, Alison E. Black: Obituary: Dr Elsie Widdowson, 1906-2000 . In: Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics . tape 13 , no. 4 , August 2000, p. 315-316 , doi : 10.1046 / j.1365-277x.2000.00245.x .
7. ↑ Jane Elliott: Elsie - mother of the modern loaf. In: BBC News. March 25, 2007, accessed October 8, 2019 . 
8. ^ Margaret Ashwell: Obituary: Elsie Widdowson (1906-2000) . In: Nature . tape 406 , no. 844 , August 24, 2000 ( nature.com [accessed October 9, 2019]).
9. ↑ Margaret Ashwell: McCance & Widdowson. A Scientific Partnership of 60 Years, 1933-1993 . British Nutrition Foundation, 1993, ISBN 0-907667-07-4 .