From The Composition of Foods using chemical analysis…to micronutrients and beyond

Abstract

In the early 1930s, after obtaining her PhD on the carbohydrates in apples, Dr Elsie Widdowson embarked on a postgraduate course in dietetics at King’s College of Household and Social Science, London. During the hospital training element of this course at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, she was appalled at the inaccuracy of the food compositional data being used to formulate medically-prescribed diets. She resolved to change matters, and after she had joined Dr McCance’s team she realized that they had already obtained sufficient new analytical data on the majority of the food groups to form the basis of completely new tables.