Arthur Schatzkin was Chief of the Nutritional Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute. He led its Polyp Prevention Trial that demonstrated that a diet low in fat and high in fiber did not prevent the recurrence of adenomas in the large colon, as many had thought. He initiated the huge 500,000+ prospective cohort study …
Paul Gyorgy was a Hungarian-American pediatrician who helped discover three vitamins–riboflavin (B-2), pyridoxine (B-6), and biotin–while working in Heidelberg, Germany, Cambridge, England, and Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Roger J. Williams was an American biochemist who discovered the B-vitamin pantothenic acid and who directed the Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, where much early research on B vitamins was conducted.
Nathan Pritikin was a successful inventor who, when diagnosed with heart disease at the age of 42, adopted a strict diet and exercise program to reverse the disease. In 1976, he founded the first of his Pritikin Centers which treated heart disease patients with lifestyle changes. His first book, ”The Pritikin Program for Diet & …
Victor Herbert was a hematologist, Army veteran of four wars, and a staunch opponent of what he considered health fraud. His self-experimentation demonstrating that folate deficiency results in anemia is documented in Lawrence Altman’s book “Who Goes First?”
Vernon Young was the world’s leading expert on human protein and amino acid requirements and metabolism during the late 20th century. His research established that the requirement for essential amino acids was much higher than previously thought.
David Kritchevsky was a leader in the fields of cholesterol, fatty acids and atherosclerosis, and dietary fiber during the second half of the 20th century, mostly at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia.
Adelle Davis popularized nutrition for millions of Americans during the 1960s and 1970s through a series of information-dense books that criticized processed foods and promoted dietary supplements. Although she had a master’s degree in biochemistry and included hundreds of references to the scientific literature in her books, the mainstream medical and nutrition community condemned her …
James Lind, a Scottish physician, conducted one of the first clinical trials in nutrition, demonstrating that certain foods could prevent scurvy. He was serving as a surgeon aboard a British ship-of-war patrolling the Bay of Biscay in 1747 when he tested six treatments on 12 sailors suffering from scurvy: cider, sulfuric acid, vinegar, seawater, citrus …
Henry C Sherman was one of the leading American nutritionists of the first half of the 20th century at Columbia University. Sherman’s research extended from vitamins and minerals, especially calcium, to essential amino acids, digestive enzymes, to multigenerational animal feeding studies. Sherman also pioneered the use of statistics to analyze the results of biological experiments. …
Ancel Keys was one of the most influential nutritionists of the 20th century. At the University of Minnesota, he helped develop the non-perishable, portable military meals called K-rations and during World War II studied the effects of food deprivation on conscientious objectors in the “Minnesota Starvation Experiment.”
William Rathje was an American archaeologist best known for launching the “Garbage Project” in Tucson, Arizona, in 1973. The Project carefully collected and analyzed what residents threw away and revealed actual, rather than self-reported, consumption patterns, especially of food and drink.
Lester Breslow, the UCLA researcher who became known as “Mr. Public Health” because of his research emphasizing the beneficial effects of avoiding certain behaviors, such as smoking, overeating and failing to exercise regularly, died on April 9, 2012. He was 97.
Wilbur Olin Atwater, known as the father of American nutrition science, was the preeminent nutritionist in the United States for 25 years at the end of the 19th century. He established American nutrition on a quantitative basis, while explaining in popular articles what the new understanding of food meant for families.
Alfred Hess was an independently wealthy New York City pediatrician who for 25 years financed his own research into the health problems of children at several labs in the city. The first part of his career, which involved experimentation on infants that today would be considered unethical, culminated in a monograph on scurvy in 1920.
Norman Farnsworth, the leading U.S. expert on medicinal plant research, died September 10, 2011, in Chicago from congestive heart failure and type 2 diabetes. He was 81. Farnsworth taught and did research at the University of Illinois at Chicago for 41 years, where he was head of the pharmacognosy graduate program from 1970-1982 and Distinguished …
Graham Lusk was a leading American nutrition scientist during the first three decades of the 20th century, most of the time as a professor of physiology at the Cornell University Medical College in New York City.Profoundly influenced by his graduate education abroad under the leading German scientists, Lusk worked to put nutrition on a firm …
