Elsie Widdowson
- Born
- 21 October 1906
- Died
- 14 June 2000 (age 93)
Elsie Widdowson was a pioneer in the scientific study of nutrition and one of the creators of the state-recommended diet during World War Two.
Widdowson trained as a chemist at Imperial College in London. She specialised in the analysis of food, nutrition, and how diet affects development before and after birth. She began working with Professor R A McCance in 1933, in a partnership that was to last for 60 years. The pair changed the way that nutritional values were assessed, how dietary deficiencies were investigated and how mammalian development was perceived.
Her scientific discoveries have had universal influence in such diverse fields as farming practices, veterinary medicine, infant physiology, growth and Third World nutrition.
Widdowson and McCance established that the nutritional tables in use at the time were wrong, as they did not account for the loss of fructose during analysis. In 1940, they published The Composition of Foods, which became a standard book in nutritional science. They pioneered research on the chemical composition of the human body and the variation in individuals’ food intakes.
During the Secone World War, Widdowson and McCance investigated ways that people could get all the right nutrition to remain healthy, despite the shortages of food. They experimented to see if Britain could produce enough food for people to live on, by restricting themselves to a diet of bread, cabbage and potatoes. After three months, they went mountain climbing and cycling in the Lake District and concluded that the food could provide enough energy for people, if calcium supplements were provided. This research was the basis of rationing policies that were introduced during the war and calcium was added to bread in the early 1940s.
After the war, Widdowson researched nutrition in new-born babies and the importance of breast milk and breast feeding. She was consulted on the diets that would help starving concentration camp victims to recover. She also investigated how different types of bread affected the recovery of malnourished children in Germany.
Widdowson was president of the British Nutrition Foundation, elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society and made a Companion of Honour.