Diseases of Faulty Nutrition
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: Dr. Robert McCarrison is one of the true giants of early nutrition research. As a member of Britain's Indian Medical Service in the first decades of the twentieth century, he conducted the first studies demonstrating the effects of vitamin-deficient diets on animal tissues and organs—at a time when little or nothing was known about the vitamins. In this 1927 excerpt from the transactions of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, McCarrison peppers the pages with memorable quotes, setting the basic principles of nutrition that, were they ever heeded by his fellow physicians, would have changed the way medicine is practiced today. "Obsessed with the idea of the microbe," he writes, "we often forget the most fundamental of all rules for the physician, that the right kind of food is the most important single factor in the promotion of health and the wrong kind of food the most important single factor in the promotion of disease." In particular, McCarrison focuses on the "minor manifestations" of vitamin deficiency as harbingers of disease with which every good doctor should be familiar. "I emphasize these minor manifestations of malnutrition because they represent the beginnings of disease, and their recognition is, to my way of thinking, vastly more important than that of the wreckages of health, which even the man in the street can see, though his name for them may be less sonorous than our own." You will find much more about and by this true pioneer of nutrition within these archives. From Transactions of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, England, 1927.
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Medical Testament—Nutrition & Soil Fertility
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD, and by Sir Albert Howard
Summary: A report on speeches given by Sir Dr. Robert McCarrison and Sir Albert Howard in support of the Medical Testament of the Doctors of Cheshire, England, a declaration of the county's 600 physicians that prevention of disease would be impossible if people continued to eat a diet high in processed foods. (You can read the doctors' pronouncement in these archives under the title "Medical Testament of the Doctors of Cheshire, England.") McCarrison and Howard touch on their extensive research in India and lay out two of the fundamental principles of nutrition: (1) only a diet of whole, natural foods can truly nourish the human body and (2) the nutritive value of natural foods, in turn, depends on the health of the soil it is grown in or on. From The New English Weekly, 1939.
Nutrition and Health
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: Dr. McCarrison, the famed nutritional researcher knighted for his work in India (which culminated in the classic reference Studies in Deficiency Disease, available in these archives), gives a lecture to London schoolchildren about diet and nutrition. He recounts his famous rat-feeding studies mimicking the diets of differing populations in India and, based on the results of his studies, gives his prescription for a basic healthful diet: freshly milled grains, raw milk and milk products, legumes, fresh vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. Reprint 43, 1937.
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Nutrition and National Health: The Cantor Lectures
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: In this in-depth lecture before the Royal Society of Arts, Dr. McCarrison discusses conclusions and observations of his pioneering research as Britain's former Director of Research on Nutrition in India and its implications for the health of Britain's population. "The greatest single factor in the acquisition and maintenance of good health," he says, "is perfectly constituted [i.e., whole, natural] food." 1936.
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Nutrition in Health and Disease
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: In this 1936 article from the British Medical Journal, nutrition pioneer Sir Dr. Robert McCarrison lays out some of the basic principles of nutrition—principles that have long been lost by a modern world that has convinced itself that processed foods are sufficient substitutes for whole natural foods. In addition to the fundamental truth that only whole foods can properly nourish the body, McCarrison discusses specific dysfunctions that occur in the two body systems affected most immediately by a poor diet—the gastro-intestinal tract and the endocrine system. 1936.
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Studies in Deficiency Disease
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: The complete classic of 1921, as republished by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research in 1945. Dr. McCarrison was knighted in England for his groundbreaking research while serving as a British army surgeon in India during the first two decades of the twentieth century. His landmark investigations into the connection between the diets of various populations in India and their patterns of disease and health gave new insight into the cause and effect of nutrition on health and introduced the world to the amazingly healthy and long-lived Hunza people of the Himalayas. McCarrison set up laboratories in which he studied the effect of various local diets on animals, reproducing nearly the same health and disease patterns in the animals as displayed in the particular populations. Diet, he concluded, was the determining factor in the specific health patterns of each population. McCarrison was also the first researcher to inform the medical world that the endocrine system is the first system in the body to succumb to the effects of malnutrition, carefully demonstrating the lesions in the endocrine glands caused by specific adulterated foods. His work inspired the likes of Royal Lee, Weston A. Price, Francis Pottenger, Jr., and J. I. Rodale. Still remarkably relevant today, this book should be part of the corpus of all colleges of the healing arts. Originally published by Oxford Medical Publications, 1921.
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