Papers relating to the Oxford Nutrition Survey and Laboratory of Human Nutrition

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Hugh Macdonald Sinclair was born in 1910 and came from a well connected family. He was educated at Winchester and Oriel College. He continued his studies at University College Hospital and obtained his Oxford DM in 1939. Sinclair was elected as university demonstrator and lecturer in biochemistry at Oxford, and a fellow of Magdalen College, in 1937. Sinclair was the Director of the Oxford Nutrition Survey (ONS) from 1942-7. The ONS carried out surveys for the Government on a wide range of groups in the UK, such as pregnant women, students and manual workers. The surveys were used to help ensure that ration levels were sufficient for maintaining a healthy population. The ONS also carried out survey work in the British occupied areas of Germany and the Netherlands after the war where the people were suffering from malnutrition. The ONS became the Laboratory of Human Nutrition (LHN) in 1946. Sinclair was appointed Reader in Human Nutrition at Oxford in 1951. However, by this time the study of nutrition as a separate subject was not viewed by many in the medical profession or academia to be necessary; it was felt all significant research on the subject had already been done. Sinclair lost his position at Oxford in 1958. The loss of Sinclair’s post was also contributed by other factors. One was his interest in the relative deficiency of essential polyunsaturated fatty acids (EFAs) which he felt was the main cause of various ‘diseases of civilization’ such as heart disease. In 1956 he wrote a long and controversial letter outlining his views to The Lancet (6 April 1956, 381). He was widely disagreed with. We now know that Sinclair was ahead of the times and take for granted that EFAs play an important role in human nutrition. Another factor was Sinclair’s unfortunate manner of dealing with authority, something that many remember him for. Although he lost his readership he remained a fellow at Magdalen. Sinclair spent the next few years teaching abroad and raising money to set up an independent nutrition institute. Largely with independent means, he set up the International Institute of Human Nutrition (IIHN) in 1972 and spent the rest of his life trying to raise funds for what he saw as a key research institute for the study of nutrition. Sinclair continued to research the role of EFAs and particularly studied population groups such as Eskimos who had little instances of heart disease but had a diet high in fat. His interest in this area had first occurred during the War when he visited Canada to assist the Air Force in investigating snow-blindness. He made his initial observations about the Eskimo population and their diet during his time in Canada and in 1976 when he gained funding to study Eskimos in Greenland. In 1979 Sinclair set out to prove the importance of EFAs by living off of an Eskimo diet for 100 days. He ate only seal and fish and tested his blood clotting times. This self-experiment was controversial and he did not receive any external funding as no ethics committee would approve the diet. Sinclair believed that self-experimentation was key and that testing animals alone was not enough to further research on human nutrition. His results were never properly written up but he did find that his clotting time extended greatly. No other major research was undertaken by Sinclair although much work was carried out at the IIHN. He sat on many committees, attended a great number of conferences and advised on areas such as fluoridation of water and EFAs. He was a visiting lecturer at the University of Reading (1970-80) and oversaw many students at Magdalen. By the 1970s his ideas on EFAs had become much more widely accepted and the importance of his contribution acknowledged which he greatly enjoyed. He died in 22 June 1990.

The Oxford Nutrition Survey (ONS) was established in May 1941 and was financed by the Ministry of Health, Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Rockefeller Foundation. It carried out nutritional surveys, investigated problems with the Armed Forces and researched war-time public health problems. The methods used were clinical, somatometric, functional, chemical and dietary. The ONS examined over 17,000 subjects and carried out over 70,000 chemical and functional estimations. In April 1945 the ONS was invited by the Netherlands Military Administration to take a team to Holland. The work was transferred to Germany to carry out nutritional surveys in the British Zone. The ONS was initially accomodated in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. It later moved to 10 Parks Road, Oxford. It later occupied huts at the Churchill Hospital. The ONS officially ceased on the 30th December 1946. To carry on its work, the Laboratory of Human Nutrition was established in July 1947 with fuding from the Wellcome Trust. The bulk of the material in the collection covers the surveys in Holland (605) and Germany (606), and this material stretches from the early 1940s through to the early 1950s. Material from these surveys includes details about the provision of equipment, transport and staff, analysis of ration foods, reports on availability of foodstuffs, notes and data from individual institutions such as schools, factories and orphanages, data stratified by survey area (especially in Germany, where the Nutrition Survey Teams worked in the different Zones of the country and of Berlin). The data includes height and weight indices, analysis of general health, nutrients in blood and urine samples and a special focus on hunger oedema patients. The archive also contains extensive notes on the preparation of this data for tabulating by Hollerith machine, with files and boxes devoted to calculations for the process and to the Hollerith cards themselves. An extensive set of reports, preparation for them and minutes/details of the meetings at which they were presented occupy considerable archive space. Other surveys that feature heavily in the archive include the Oxford Families surveys (1, 2 and 4), Hook Norton (3), Merthyr Tydfil (602), Wallingford Farm Training Colony (324), College diets (153), Magdalen undergraduates (901), Clinical students (151), the Army Blood Transfusion Service (801), the Emergency Blood Transfusion Service (802) and Patients (500). Materials in the archive which relate to these surveys include lists of survey participants with names, addresses, dates of birth, age, height and weight, blood and urine analyses, diet survey notebooks, dark adaptation test results, some photographic plates, case histories and diagnoses of individual patients, socioeconomic data and surveys of working and living conditions. Consent forms for many of the Oxford Families survey participants are also contained within the archive. As with the German and Dutch materials, there are comprehensive summary tables and notes on calculating and tabulating the data ready for Hollerith and Cope-Chat cards (seemingly an earlier form of Hollerith). Extensive analysis of blood samples is evident for the ABTS and EBTS, especially in comparison with what are termed ‘main’ and ‘Dutch’ samples, and reports in the style of the Dutch and German surveys exist for Oxford Families in particular. Further surveys which the archive contains include those in Accrington (601), Chesterfield (603) and Dundee (604); there are also references to and some data for Kent nurses (703), Canadian bush Indians (101), Hospital diets (121), staff (122), naval ratings (131), RCAF, RAF etc in Canada (132), Indian troops (133), returned Prisoners of War (134), various on pregnant and nursing mothers (141 a-c), College body weight survey (152), Cadets etc (154), Merthyr schoolchildren (181), Oxfordshire schoolchildren (182), Shillingford Orphanage (183), Dutch refugee children (184a-f), British restaurants (902), various deficiency surveys (301-4), feeding experiments (321-2), factory feeding tests (323a-b), TNT factory workers (351) and various special nutrient surveys (432, 435, 438, 444, 457). At least some data exists for all of these surveys and for some surveys there are brief reports also. Much of the data for individual surveys is reused in general analysis of blood content and nutrient values and turns up frequently in the form of samples which are used in tests (especially true of the Wallingford and TNT factory samples). Other materials which make up the archive include large numbers of notebooks which vary from containing survey data to petty cash expenses to minutes of ONS staff meetings to experiments on rats.

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