IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB001561853

Interpreting the “Newer Knowledge of Nutrition”: Science, Interests, and Values in the Making of Dietary Advice in the United States, 1915--1965 (2005)

University of Virginia
Kett, Joseph F.
Publication date: 2005
Language: English

Publication Date: 2005
Edition Details: Advisor: Kett, Joseph F.
Physical Details: 765 pp.

Outside Links

Nutrition; dietetics Food and foods Vitamins Health promotion 20th century, early United States

This dissertation explores the diversity of interpretations given by health professionals and other Americans to the so-called ``newer knowledge of nutrition'' between the 1910s and the mid-1960s. Within two decades of the discovery of vitamins in the 1910s, nutrition experts had begun to speculate that the increased use of vitamin- and mineral-rich foods could enhance vitality, defer aging, and extend life; and that many of the common ailments suffered by Americans were caused by the consumption of nutritionally impoverished diets. These assertions were embraced by some and challenged by others. The great discoveries of the first half of the twentieth century created more uncertainties than they resolved. As a result, disputes emerged as to the composition of the ideal diet, the desirability of consuming particular foods, and usefulness of dietary supplements and vitamin-fortified foods. During these controversies, individuals took sides according to their interests and values. Professions with an antiquackery bias tended to discount the significance of nutrition, whereas those committed to improving the American diet offered an expansive view of the influence of food on health. External circumstances also affected the interpretation of the scientific data. Concerns about national fitness on the eve of World War II led health authorities to maintain that tens of millions of Americans suffered from nutritional deficiencies, despite the tenuousness of the evidence upon which this conclusion was based. Once the war ended and economic prosperity returned, the problem of malnutrition receded from public view, despite evidence showing that many Americans were still eating poorly. The newer knowledge also gave rise to a grass-roots dietary reform movement dedicated to the proposition that much of the ill health in the United States was caused by the consumption of nutrient-depleted processed foods. Although health authorities maintained that the movement's claims were unscientific, the physicians and dentists who founded the health food movement in the 1930s believed that they were offering legitimate interpretations of nutrition science. Their interpretations, however, were colored (and distorted) by an ideology that held that urban-industrial society and modern food processing methods, in particular, disrupted the natural order and thereby threatened man's well- being.

...More

Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/03 (2005): 1128. UMI pub. no. 3168455.

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB001561853

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Guly, H. R.; (2013)
Scurvy and Other Vitamin Deficiencies during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (/p/isis/citation/CBB001200831/)

Book Lisa Haushofer; (2022)
Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition (/p/isis/citation/CBB755765560/)

Book McDowell, Lee; (2013)
Vitamin History: The Early Years (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422145/)

Article Brian Payne; (2019)
Nature's Bread: The Natural Food Debate in Canada, 1940–1949 (/p/isis/citation/CBB006947860/)

Book Charles S. Bryan; (2014)
Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra (/p/isis/citation/CBB182088684/)

Article Carstairs, Catherine; (2014)
“Our Sickness Record Is a National Disgrace”: Adelle Davis, Nutritional Determinism, and the Anxious 1970s (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420766/)

Thesis Frohlich, Xaq Zachary; (2011)
Accounting for Taste: Regulating Food Labeling in the “Affluent Society,” 1945--1995 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001567293/)

Book Wallach, Jennifer Jensen; (2013)
How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture (/p/isis/citation/CBB001202133/)

Book Veit, Helen Zoe; (2013)
Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201323/)

Book Andrew R. Ruis; (2017)
Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States (/p/isis/citation/CBB039589050/)

Article Collingham, Lizzie; (2009)
Porridge and Peas: C. Stanton Hicks and Australian Army Rations (/p/isis/citation/CBB000932657/)

Article Sen, Srabani; (2005)
Dawn of Nutrition Research in India---Pre-Independence Era (/p/isis/citation/CBB000600469/)

Article James F. Stark; (2018)
“Replace them by Salads and Vegetables”: Dietary Innovation, Youthfulness, and Authority, 1900–1939 (/p/isis/citation/CBB834326250/)

Book Adrienne Rose Bitar; (2018)
Diet and the Disease of Civilization (/p/isis/citation/CBB944318327/)

Article Erdheim, Cara; (2013)
Naturalism's Dietary Discourse: From Fasting Fads to Sinclair's Social Reforms (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320896/)

Thesis Ehrenberger, Kristen Ann; (2014)
The Politics of the Table: Nutrition and the Telescopic Body in Saxon Germany, 1890--1935 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001567561/)

Article Perdiguero-Gil, Enrique; Castejón-Bolea, Ramón; (2010)
Popularising Right Food and Feeding Practices in Spain (1847--1950). The Handbooks of Domestic Economy (/p/isis/citation/CBB001022203/)

Book Michael D. Wise; Jennifer Jensen Wallach; (2016)
The Routledge History of American Foodways (/p/isis/citation/CBB146111641/)

Article Matthew H. Hersch; (2024)
“Learning on Their Bellies” (/p/isis/citation/CBB219572134/)

Book Jennifer Jensen Wallach; (2019)
Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century America (/p/isis/citation/CBB218169383/)