Industrial Nutrition Advice Part 2: Elmer McCollum

Elmer Verner McCollum, 1879–1967

McCollum is surprisingly not very famous today, even as Edward and May Mellanby, Weston Price, Robert McCarrison, Francis Pottenger, and others are re-gaining lay notoriety. Unfortunately, I view the growing popularity of 20th Century nutritionists within Paleo, Ancestral, and likewise circles more due to fadish tendencies than to a serious intellectual revisionism of modern nutrition science. If a meaningful historical understanding of early nutrition science is to occur, one must know McCollum, since his work heavily influenced so many.

McCollum was an academic nutritional biochemist who was among the first to discover the existence of essential vitamin cofactors. He consequently coined the term ‘protective foods’ to refer to those foods which contained an abundance of these essential cofactors, while those foods relatively void of such co-factors could be referred to (using a modern term) as ’empty calories’. White flour might be an example of a food essentially non-toxic, but needing to be paired with enough other ‘protective’ foods in the diet to make good its deficiencies. This perspective of ‘protective’ foods was used by essentially all nutritionists for decades to come (though it has generally fallen out of favor today, as deficiency diseases are assumed exceptionally…