Nutrition and Health

Food promotes health. When we speak of 'needs' in relation to food we do not merely mean the quantities that people will purchase in a certain environment and with a certain amount of money in their pockets. Diet is one of the few sectors of demand where 'need' has more than an economic meaning; the human body 'needs' at least a minimum daily intake of certain nutrients in order to remain healthy, and human beings need a diet which contains an adequate supply of these nutrients.

This knowledge is relatively new, acquired during the last fifty years. Before that, in the nineteenth century, nutrition could be classed with political economy among the dismal sciences. But at the beginning of this century the laboratory analysis of foodstuffs revealed the existence and importance of vitamins as also, later on, of the various minerals present in foods often in minute quantities. Moreover, Atwater and his colleagues were able to establish that certain diseases were associated with the absence or insufficiency of certain elements in the diet. The cure for scurvy had been found empirically long before, but now the nutritional link was forged with such diseases as rickets, pellagra, beri-beri, night blindness, bilharzia and others. Certain groups of foodstuffs became known as 'protective foods' inasmuch as the eating of them protected people against diseases resulting from specific dietary deficiencies. As the science of nutrition grew, it became clear that certain categories of the population having special nutritional requirements -- expectant and nursing mothers and infants -- would be more likely than others to have deficient diets even in relatively prosperous communities. They became known as the 'vulnerable groups', and it was found that correct feeding of these people could greatly reduce the incidence of disease and mortality among infants and child-bearing women. Milk was singled out as the most valuable and 'protective' of all the protective foods on account of its vitamin and mineral content.

It was not enough merely to verify the connection between nutrition and health, it was also desired to measure the extent of malnutrition, first in the more developed countries, and to this task nutrition workers addressed themselves. The early thirties were years of depression and mass unemployment, particularly in Europe and North America. Unable to get jobs through no fault of their own, millions found themselves prevented from feeding their families properly, so there was no lack of raw material for field surveys of malnutrition. This was the pioneering period of consumer surveys which were carried out in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK and other European countries.