Elsie Widdowson

Widdowson was born in Wallington, Surrey. Her father was a grocer's assistant. Her younger sister Eva Crane trained as a nuclear physicist but became a world-renowned authority on bees. She lived in Dulwich and attended Sydenham County Grammar School for Girls.

During the 1920s and 1930s, professional opportunities for women, apart from nursing or teaching, were limited. Educated women such as Widdowson had to develop skills that offered employment potential; therefore, Widdowson trained as a chemist.

She studied chemistry at Imperial College, London and graduated with a BSc in 1928, becoming one of the first women graduates of Imperial College. She did postgraduate work at the Department of Plant Physiology at Imperial College, developing methods for separating and measuring the fructose, glucose, sucrose, and hemicellulose of fruit. She would measure individual changes in the carbohydrates in fruit from the time it appeared on the tree to when it ripened. In 1931, she received her PhD in chemistry from the Imperial College for her thesis on the carbohydrate content of apples.

While her early studies are primarily plant-based, Widdowson was much more interested in the biochemistry of animals and humans. She did further research with Professor Charles Dodds at the Courtauld Institute of Biochemistry at Middlesex Hospital, on the metabolism of the kidneys, and also received a doctorate from the Courtauld Institute.

Bronze bust of Elsie Widdowson by Margo Bulman (1974), at the Royal Society, London.

Although Widdowson had attained a doctoral degree from a prestigious institution, she was still struggling to find a long-term position. Dr. Dodds suggested that Widdowson consider specializing in dietetics, so she started a postgraduate diploma at King's College, London. She learned about the compositions of meat and fish and how cooking affected them.

Widdowson met Robert McCance in the kitchens at King's College Hospital in 1933, when she was studying industrial cooking techniques as part of her diploma on dietetics. McCance was a junior doctor researching the chemical effects of cooking as part of his clinical research on the treatment of diabetes. Widdowson pointed out an error in McCance's analysis of the fructose content of fruit. Instead of being offended, McCance obtained a grant for Widdowson to analyze and correct all previous data. From there on they became scientific partners and worked together for the next 60 years, until McCance died in 1993. A few years after the first grant, McCance obtained a second grant for Widdowson to continue working on the food composition of fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

McCance became a Reader in Medicine at Cambridge University in 1938, and Widdowson joined his team at the Department of Experimental Medicine in Cambridge. They worked on the chemical composition of the human body, and on the nutritional value of different flours used to make bread. Widdowson also studied the impact of infant diet on human growth. They studied the differing effects from deficiencies of salt and of water, and produced the first tables to compare the different nutritional content of foods before and after cooking. Their work became of national importance during the Second World War. Widdowson and McCance were co-authors of The Chemical Composition of Foods, first published in 1940 by the Medical Research Council. Their book "McCance and Widdowson" became known as the dietician's bible and formed the basis for modern nutritional thinking.

As WWII progressed, the blockade on most food tightened. Essential foods such as butter, meat, cheese, fish, and eggs became very limited. Widdowson and McCance became concerned for the health effects such an extreme rationing system would cause. Widdowson and McCance and their colleagues became their own experimental subjects. The two would put themselves on a starvation diet, coupled with rigorous exercise such as climbing mountains and burning almost 5,000 calories (the healthy amount of calories to burn per day for a woman is about 2,500). Then, they would put themselves on their developed diet of bread, cabbage and potatoes for several months to find out if wartime rationing—with little meat, dairy or calcium intake—would affect their health. They showed that good health could be supported by this very restricted diet. They were also the first to advocate for the fortification of food, specifically bread, with vitamins and minerals such as calcium. Their work became the basis of the wartime austerity diet promoted by the Minister of Food Lord Woolton.

Widdowson and McCance headed the first mandated addition of vitamins and minerals to food. Their work began in the early 1940s, when calcium was added to bread.[3] They were also responsible for formulating the wartime rationing of Britain during World War II.[3]

Widdowson and McCance were employed by the Medical Research Council from 1946, and spent most of their working life in Cambridge. They were consulted on the rehabilitation of the victims of severe starvation in Nazi concentration camps, and visited the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark in early 1946 to study of the impact of the poor wartime diet on the people in Nazi-occupied territories. Widdowson followed up this work in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by studying malnourishment in Africa. Research on animals showed that malnourishment in early life led to lifelong effects on growth and health.

Injecting minerals into Dr. Widdowson's arm

Widdowson showed that a newborn human infant has 16 per cent of its weight as fat, much greater than the one or two per cent of other species. She also studied the importance of the nutritional content of infant diets, particularly trace vitamins and minerals in natural and artificial human milk. Her work led to revised standards for breast milk substitutes in the UK in the 1980s.

Widdowson became head of the Infant Nutrition Research Division at the Dunn Nutritional Laboratory in Cambridge in 1966. She formally retired in 1972, but continued academic research in the Department of Investigative Medicine at Addenbrooke's Hospital. She was president of the Nutrition Society from 1977 to 1980, president of the Neonatal Society from 1978 to 1981, and president of the British Nutrition Foundation from 1986 to 1996. She became a Fellow of Imperial College in 1994.

She became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976 and was appointed a CBE in 1979. She was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1993, which is awarded for outstanding achievements in the arts, literature, music, science, politics, industry, or religion.[4]

The British Nutrition Foundation published a book in 1993 to celebrate 60 years of her partnership with McCance, McCance & Widdowson. A Scientific Partnership of 60 Years, 1933–1993, edited by Margaret Ashwell.

Widdowson lived in Barrington near Cambridge for over 50 years. She ate a simple diet, including butter and eggs, and attributed her longevity to good genes: her father lived to 96 and her mother to 107. She died at Addenbrooke's Hospital after suffering a stroke while on holiday with her sister in Ireland. She never married.

In 2020, she was included by the BBC in a list of seven important but little-known British female scientists.[5]

Imperial College offers the Elsie Widdowson Fellowship for academic staff returning to work following maternity, adoption and/or shared parental leave.[6]

• Imperial College
• Obituary, The Telegraph, 22 June 2000
• Science Museum
• Obituary, The Guardian, 22 June 2000
• MRC Elsie Widdowson Laboratory, 22 May 2018
• The Economist, 29 June 2000
• Whitehead, Roger (2012) [2004]. "Widdowson, Elsie May (1906–2000)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/74313. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Dr. Elsie Widdowson CH, CBE, FRS, MRC Human Nutrition Research
• The Elsie Widdowson Lecture, The Neonatal Society
• Obituary: Elsie Widdowson (1906–2000), Nature 406, 844 (24 August 2000)
• A personal appreciation: Dr Elsie M. Widdowson, 22 October 1906–14 June 2000, Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, Volume 60, Issue 02, May 2001, pp 157–160
• Great Lives: Helen Sharman on Elsie Widdowson
• Watch a video oral history interview with Dr Elsie Widdowson - recorded by Oxford Brookes University in partnership with the Royal College of Physicians as part of the Medical Sciences Video Archive.