The founding father of American nutritional science, Wilbur O. Atwater, 60, suffered an incapacitating stroke in late 1904 in Washington, DC. His wife Marcia took him to Philadelphia to consult a specialist, but little could be done for him. Eventually, Atwater moved back to his home in Middletown, Connecticut, where he remained bedridden for the …
Mark Hegsted, who later became administrator of human nutrition in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was sure he didn’t want to be a farmer. “The general direction of my career was probably determined during my first few days at the University of Idaho,” he wrote. “I had been awarded a Union Pacific Scholarship that paid …
The first American to orbit the earth, John Glenn “carried a menu of freeze-dried powders, tubed spaghetti and roast beef, and a variety of foods reduced to bit-sized cubes The cubes flaked into crumbs that floated around the astronaut’s capsule,” according to a military history of food in space.
Robert Falcon Scott and his party of four others likely starved to death on their return from the South Pole in 1912 because they underestimated their caloric needs and did not have enough rations to sustain their exertions, according to Lewis Halsey and Mike Stroud.
Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, 75, appeared in a television commercial for Good Luck brand margarine in 1959. She was paid $35,000 (equivalent to more than a quarter million dollars in today’s money) which she apparently donated to charity.
“I perhaps owe something in a sense to Victor Herbert,” Linus Pauling disclosed in an interview a few years before his death. “I probably never would have written the several books that I’ve written about nutrition and health and disease if it had not been for Victor Herbert.” Victor Herbert was a hematologist and a …
Linus Pauling: I owe my work on vitamin C to Victor Herbert Read More »
“When about 16 years of age I happened to meet with a book, written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet. I determined to go into it. My brother, being yet unmarried, did not keep house, but boarded himself and his apprentices in another family. My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I …
“The first four months at Donner [the Donner Laboratory of Medical Physics at the University of California Berkeley] was a period of progressively increasing frustration. Every possible lead I thought of led nowhere. The frustration ended suddenly one morning during the first part of November, 1954.”
Herbert McLean Evans, who discovered vitamin E in 1922, invited a faculty colleague to lunch to help him name this alcohol that was necessary for laboratory animals to bring their offspring to birth.
Letters from an obese president tell a familiar story of struggling with weight. by Howard LeWine, M.D., Harvard Health Publications William Howard Taft was America’s heaviest president. He would have preferred being seen and remembered for something else, and took steps to lose weight. Taft’s story of weight loss and regain, described in the Annals …