Elsie May Widdowson pioneered important research into human and animal diets that led to the introduction of a UK healthy rationing system in WWII, alongside the compulsory addition of calcium to bread-making flour. Her research helped the readjustment of post-concentration camp starvation victims and war-torn communities, and has left a lasting legacy that continues to this day.
Born in 1908 in London, Elsie May Widdowson was no stranger to growing up in a wartime society. Both she and her sister were encouraged to pursue the sciences, and Elsie began to train as a chemist at Imperial College London, studying everything from the chemistry of ripening fruit to the functioning of the kidney. She sat the bachelor’s examination after two years, and progressed onto her doctorate to study the chemistry of food and its effect on health.
It was later whilst working in the kitchens of a local hospital to research the chemical consequences of cooking that Elsie met Dr. Robert McCance, a fellow dietician; Elsie had no reservations about telling Robert that she had realised some of his results must be incorrect. Impressed by her knowledge of the field, Robert invited Elsie to work with him, and the pair soon began a 60-year partnership investigating the chemical composition of food in the British diet.
In 1940, Elsie and Roberts published The Chemical Composition of Foods, a comprehensive digest containing 15,000 nutritional values of cooked and raw foods. The book ran into six editions, gaining popularity as ‘the dietician’s bible’. With the Second World War underway, the pair then took their first steps into formulating war-time rationing. They lived for several weeks in the Lake District, experimenting with a frugal diet of bread, cabbage and potatoes and walking through the area to test its effect on their fitness.
Using themselves as guinea pigs they also self-injected with solutions of calcium, magnesium and iron as a means of understanding mineral metabolism in the body, at one point becoming extremely ill from a bacterial contamination of their strontium lactate samples. Nevertheless, Elsie and Robert demonstrated that health could still be nutritionally maintained on a diet so small that others had predicted starvation; the experiment was pronounced a resounding success, with the UK Ministry of Food adopting the rationing and promoting the frugal diet thereafter.
Elsie also conducted research on the importance of calcium in preventing rickets, and together with Robert led the introduction of the compulsory national addition of calcium into bread-making flour. Some experts have said the time under Elsie’s diet was the period in which Britain was at its healthiest.
Elsie later served as a consultant to advise the careful dietary policy needed to remedy the effects of starvation suffered by victims of concentration camps. Following the war, she also toured Holland, Germany and Denmark to study the nutrition of war-damaged communities, launching an experimental programme that would span for 25 years.
Elsie’s broad range of interests also led her to pioneer nutrition research in other areas. With an interest in developmental health, she studied the milk of giant pandas and elephants to determine why their young had high mortality rates when hand-reared with cow’s milk. Elsie also became involved in analysing the composition of breast milk to pave the way for modern formulae – her Medical Research Council Special Report on children’s dietary health in 1947 was the first national survey of its kind.
Elsie was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976, and appointed a CBE in 1979. She has been named by the Royal Society as one of the most influential British women in the history of science. Elsie passed away in 2000, shortly after proudly cutting the turf for the MRC’s Elsie Widdowson Laboratory. Her work has left a strong legacy that is still evident today – scientists worldwide continue to reference her work, and the mandatory addition of micronutrients to flour in the UK continues to this day.
A true pioneer in the study of nutrition, chemistry and health, Elsie is remembered fondly not just as an honoured scientist, but for the determination that lay at the very heart of her research. One fond personal memoir of Elsie speculates:
What advice would Elsie Widdowson give to a young scientist? This is the thought I believe she would most like me to leave with you: If your results don’t make physiological sense, think and think again! You may have made a mistake (in which case own up to it) or you may have made a discovery. Above all, treasure your exceptions. You will learn more from them than all the rest of your data.
The Valentina Project 