Basic Issues of the History of Nutrition (review)

Nutrition is a fascinating and endlessly controversial subject, not least because many details of the principal historical questions in this field remain under active investigation today: What food substances are required in the human diet, and at what levels of intake? How are these substances absorbed, digested, and metabolized? How do they affect health?

Professor K. Y. Guggenheim, emeritus professor of nutrition at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, addresses these questions through brief essays on the work of Great Men in specific eras, such as da Vinci and Vesalius in Renaissance Italy, van Helmont in the Baroque Age, Boerhaave and Haller in the eighteenth century. Ten such chapters are accompanied by thirteen plates of drawings or photographs of the Great Men, and by six figures. Two of the figures reproduce the title pages of Liebig’s 1842 Animal Chemistryand Pereira’s 1843 Treatise on Food and Diet, tempting this reader to race to the library to read the originals. Another is a drawing by Mme. Lavoisier of one of her husband’s respiration experiments, in which she depicts herself in the laboratory, quietly recording the data—an otherwise unacknowledged contributor to his work.

For readers interested in tracing the development of issues in nutrition science, as suggested by the title, this book will prove frustrating. The chapters are slightly expanded versions of work published previously; this second edition adds only the chapter on Lavoisier and a corresponding section in the introduction. Any book that reviews 2,400 years of nutrition investigations in 125 pages will be superficial. This one reads like the Reader’s Digestversion of “Nutrition’s Greatest Hits.”

Professor Guggenheim covers them all: Galen’s diet-and-exercise treatment for obesity, van Helmont’s tree-watering experiments (water transforming into wood), Lavoisier’s measurements of the caloric value of animal heat, Voit’s metabolic balance studies, Funk’s identification of vitamins. Such key discoveries, however, are just barely described:

Where does the nitrogen in the tissues of herbivores come from? Fourcroy attacked this problem. At first he thought that nitrogen may be absorbed by animals from the air through the skin or lungs. Later, he asserted that nitrogenous substances present in plants were converted into animal matter by removal of hydrogen and carbon from the blood, resulting in an addition of nitrogen to the plant substances digested.

(p. 75)

Most chapters review the work of many men studying many different topics at any one time period. This structure makes it difficult to trace the evolution of understanding of any one concept—metabolism or nutrient requirements, for example—over time. Professor Guggenheim’s earlier work, which covered much of the same ground, was easier to follow. ¹Thus, the most useful feature of Basic Issuesis its reference list of original sources—all available to readers who wish to learn for themselves how our present understanding of nutrition came to be.