How a Wesleyan professor pioneered modern nutritional science
Through his work at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Wilbur Ross Atwater would become known as the “father of modern nutrition research.” He pioneered the study of how humans’ diet and physical activity influence their health, and brought the concept of calories to the U.S. In so doing, he cemented the calorie’s place in food science and laid the groundwork for the sciencebased nutritional advice many of us strive to follow at the start of summer, including men as June is National Men’s Health Month.
“Food fads received no recognition from Wilbur Olin Atwater,” stated one newspaper obituary that ran in Connecticut on Sept. 26, 1907. “He pursued not notions of nutrition, but truths. And for each truth the exact why.”
Atwater searched for this nutritional truth with wild and often eccentric zeal, constructing vast contraptions and conducting elaborate, sometimes dangerous experiments on himself and others that drew the ire of his higher-ups at Wesleyan. With a kindly manner and epic walrus mustache, Atwater conducted research that challenged religious and scientific orthodoxies of the day, and while his conclusions were not always correct, he helped lay the framework for future generations of nutrition scientists.
The son of a traveling Methodist preacher, Atwater was born in 1844 in upstate New
York and went on to study agricultural chemistry at Wesleyan. On a research trip to Germany, he was introduced to the concept of the calorie, a complicated measure of energy. When Atwater returned to the U.S., he took a position as a chemistry professor at Wesleyan and became this country’s first calorie counter and one of the world’s most advanced nutritional researchers.
“Atwater’s most celebrated project was the building of a
contraption he called a respiratory calorimeter,” Bill Bryson writes in The Body. “This was a sealed chamber, not much larger than a large cupboard, in which subjects were confined for up to five days while Atwater and his helpers minutely measured various facets of their metabolism — inputs of food and oxygen, outputs of carbon dioxide, urea, ammonia, feces, and so on — and so calculated caloric intake.”
The work was so complex it took up to 16 people to read all the dials and perform calculations. Wesleyan’s president was not particularly impressed by the work and worried about its cost. “[He] ordered Atwater to take a 50 percent pay cut or hire an assistant at his own expense. Atwater chose the latter and, undeterred, worked out the calories and nutritional values of practically all known foods — some four thousand in all,” Bryson writes.
In his quest to understand every aspect of food science, Atwater took risks. In one experiment he ate a fish poisoned with ptomaine to measure the effect it had on him — it nearly killed him. The financially and sometimes physically damaging work paid off, however. In 1896 he produced The Chemical Composition of American Food Materials, an influential work on diet and nutrition. In addition to his work on food science, Atwater ran the first agricultural experiment station in the U.S. and was one of the most famous scientists of any kind in America.
However, his work was far from perfect.“Much of what Atwater concluded was ultimately wrong, but that wasn’t really his fault,” Bryson writes. “Nobody yet understood the concept of vitamins and minerals or even the need for a balanced diet. To Atwater and his contemporaries, all that made one food superior to another was how well it served as fuel.”
That led Atwater to undervalue fruits and vegetables and overvalue meat. He also concluded that alcohol was a rich source of energy, in small doses, a scandalous claim in general and for Atwater in particular. “He was a Methodist minister’s son and he knew the storm which the declaration of his discovered fact would raise,” according to his obituary. “But he stated his truth and faced the raging [Woman’s Christian Temperance Union] with the calm of the man whose ‘show-me’ demand on nature has been satisfied.”
Though his conclusions about alcohol have been criticized by modern observers, some hold up surprisingly well. For instance, Atwater advised one glass of wine a day, which is in line with what some modern studies suggest could have a positive health outcome. So if you’re a fellow proponent of the benefits of moderate drinking, raise your glass to Atwater. Just remember, an average 5-ounce glass of wine has between 120 and 130 calories.