Symposium: Historically Important Contributions of Women in the Nutrition Society: The American Society for Nutritional Sciences Diamond Jubilee Symposium Contributions of Women Scientists in the U.S. to the Development of Recommended Dietary Allowances1,2 Alfred E. Harper3 Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI My assignment is to identify some of the major contribu- it was the first official action by which a government as- tions made by women scientists in the United States to de- sumed responsibility for protecting public health through velopment of our major dietary standard, the Recommended food regulations. Dietary Allowances (RDA). I shall focus mainly on the con- The first true dietary standard also was proposed in the tributions of Dr. Hazel Stiebeling and Dr. Lydia Roberts but, as United Kingdom and we must concede that it was proposed by Downloaded from this is a history of nutrition symposium, I shall say a little first a man, a scientist and physician, Dr. Edward Smith (1819– about the early development of dietary recommendations and 1874). During an economic depression in 1862, he responded standards. to a request by the Privy Council for information as to how much food would be needed per person to prevent starvation Development of dietary standards (1). Smith calculated, from measurements he made of the amounts of carbon dioxide exhaled and nitrogen excreted by jn.nutrition.org The evolution of dietary standards has been best summa- individuals working on a treadmill, that 80 g of protein and rized by a woman scientist, Dr. Isabella Leitch. However, she 2800 kcal of energy per day from food sources would be was British, not American, so by rights her contributions do not fall within the scope of my assignment. Nonetheless, I am sufficient for a working man (2). This was the first dietary glad to have this opportunity to recognize her as the author of standard based on scientific principles. by guest on June 5, 2011 the most informative summary we have of the historical back- Because it was widely believed during the 19th century that ground of dietary recommendations and standards. Her review, a diet containing only proteins, energy sources and a few published in 1942 (1), includes references to several of Stie- minerals was nutritionally adequate, dietary recommendations beling’s papers and the first RDA publication. It is a classic were limited to energy sources and protein until after the from which most of us who have written about the subject of beginning of the 20th century (3) when evidence that foods dietary standards have borrowed freely. contained unidentified essential nutrients became generally The first formal action to institute a dietary recommen- accepted (4,5). dation as public policy, according to Leitch, was passage of During World War I (1914–1918), 70 to 80 g of protein the Merchant Seaman’s Act by the British Parliament in and 3000 kcal of energy were proposed as dietary standards for 1835. This act required that lemon juice be included in the the armed forces. These quantities for men, and scaled-down rations of sailors in the mercantile service as a measure for values for women and children, were accepted in the U.K. for preventing scurvy. This was not truly a dietary standard, but calculating food needs of the population (1). By this time, however, nutritional deficiency diseases had been discovered. Foods that prevented these diseases were called “protective” 1 Presented at the Experimental Biology meeting, April 11–15 2003, San foods (6). In order to ensure that diets would provide the Diego, CA. The symposium was sponsored by the American Society for Nutri- recently discovered essential nutrients, the British authorities tional Sciences (ASNS) and the ASNS History Committee. The proceedings are published as a supplement to The Journal of Nutrition. This supplement is the recommended that a considerable proportion of milk be in- responsibility of the guest editors to whom the Editor of The Journal of Nutrition cluded in the diets of children and a certain proportion of fresh has delegated supervision of both technical conformity to the published regula- fruits and leafy green vegetables be included in all diets. Later, tions of The Journal of Nutrition and general oversight of the scientific merit of each article. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, committees and are not attributable to the sponsors or the publisher, editor or editorial board of the League of Nations Health Organization began accumu- of The Journal of Nutrition. Guest Editors for the symposium publication are lating information about human requirements for minerals and Jacqueline Dupont, Florida State University and Patricia Swan, Iowa State Uni- versity. vitamins. They did not, however, propose dietary standards 2 The Third Annual Hazel K. Stiebeling Lecture sponsored by the Department that included the newly recognized essential nutrients but did of Nutrition, Food and Exercise Sciences, College of Human Sciences, Florida recommend that protective foods be included in diets. (They State University, Tallahassee, FL. 3 To whom correspondence should be addressed. emphasized consumption of milk, leafy vegetables, eggs, fish E-mail: [email protected]. and organ meats.) 0022-3166/03 $3.00 © 2003 American Society for Nutritional Sciences. J. Nutr. 133: 3698–3702, 2003. 3698 H. K. STIEBELING AND L. J. ROBERTS 3699 the influence of vitamin D on calcium deposition in bone. She was awarded a PhD in chemistry by Columbia in 1928 for a thesis on methods for measuring tissue content of vitamins A and D. The results of these studies were evaluated using statistical methods. Careful attention to detail and statistical evaluation of results characterized Stiebeling’s work through- out her career. Two papers from these studies were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. At Sherman’s suggestion, Stiebeling took the civil service examination before finishing her graduate work, so that she might qualify for a position in a new research unit that was opening in the USDA Bureau of Home Economics. In 1930 she was offered, and accepted, an appointment as Head of a new Section on Food Economics in the Food and Nutrition Division of the Bureau. This was the beginning of a life-long career for her at the USDA. Soon after she began work at the USDA, Stiebeling undertook to design inexpensive diets that would prevent pellagra and that could serve as guides for low income families to prepare nutritionally adequate diets using home- produced foods. As part of this program, Stiebeling began an extensive investigation of the nutritive value of diets in Downloaded from FIGURE 1 Hazel Katherine Stiebeling (Photograph courtesy of the the United States. She realized that a reliable standard ASNS Archives, Eskind Biomedical Library, Vanderbilt Medical Center, against which diets designed for the various USDA pro- Nashville, TN). grams could be evaluated for nutritional adequacy was sorely needed. In a 1933 publication on diet planning (9) she included a set of what she called “dietary allowances.” Wars and economic depressions seem to have been the This, to the best of my knowledge, was the first use of this jn.nutrition.org main stimuli for development of dietary recommendations and term; also, it was the first dietary standard to include quan- standards. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, proposals titative values for several vitamins and minerals (calcium, made by Dr. Hazel Stiebeling and her colleagues at the USDA phosphorus, iron and vitamins A and C). The values were represented major advances in dietary standards. Before dis- based mainly on estimates of human requirements from cussing these, I shall introduce you to Dr. Stiebeling, a woman investigations in Sherman’s laboratory (7). by guest on June 5, 2011 scientist who contributed importantly to knowledge of diet In 1939 Stiebeling and Esther Phipard (10) expanded the composition, nutritional value of diets, dietary guidelines, and USDA dietary allowances to include thiamin and riboflavin especially to the concept and development of dietary standards (Table 1). They increased the number of age groups and they (7). proposed that to establish allowances, average requirements should be increased by 50% to allow for variability among the Hazel K. Stiebeling requirements of individuals in the population. Sherman and his associates (12) wrote in relation to this proposal, “The Hazel Katherine Stiebeling (Fig. 1) was born in 1896, in allowance of a margin of 50% above the average minimum for Haskins, Ohio. She grew up on a farm where she developed normal maintenance can now be given the clear definition it an interest in food and nutrition. In high school she studied has always needed. It is an estimate intended to cover indi- domestic science and became familiar with food and nutri- vidual variations of minimal nutritional need among appar- tion publications of the USDA. She acquired a keen inter- ently normal people. .” This concept has been basic in the est in the scientific aspects of domestic science and, after graduation, enrolled in a two-year program in Skidmore College. Her interest, she later wrote, “grew to real excite- TABLE 1 ment when I found [Dr. Henry] Sherman’s textbook ‘The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition’ (8), in the Skidmore Dietary allowances for adults1 library.” She comments that she read almost halfway through it at first sitting. Stielbing, 1933, 1939 NRC, 1941 After graduating from Skidmore, Stiebeling taught school for three years, then entered Columbia University Teachers’ Energy, kcal 2810 2775 College. Here she became an assistant in Foods and Nutrition Protein, g 68 66 Calcium, g 0.9 0.91 to Professor Mary Swartz Rose, whose contributions are dis- Phosphorus, g 1.22 — cussed elsewhere in this symposium.