1943 | Nutrition
Nutrition
Texas and Alabama adopt bread-enrichment laws: 75 percent of U.S. white bread is enriched with iron and some B vitamins, up from 30 percent in 1941. Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard bans sale of sliced bread in a move to hold down prices.
Japan acts to prevent beriberi, which is disabling many civilians. The Tokyo government distributes no white rice and orders citizens to eat haigamai (brown rice) or hichibuzuki mai (70 percent polished rice), but many, if not most, Japanese laboriously hull their hichibuzuki mai to obtain the white, glutinous, nutritionally deficient rice they prefer. Vitamin pioneer Umetaro Suzuki dies September 20 at age 69.
"Converted" rice developed by Virginia-born Texas produce broker Gordon L. Harwell, 48, with English food chemist Eric Huzenlaub will be marketed as Uncle Ben's Converted Rice after the war and will later be enriched with added B vitamins. Harwell and Huzenlaub have cooked rough, unhulled rice in a way that diffuses the outer bran layers into the kernels' starchy protein and then steamed the rice in a way that partially gelatinizes the starch to seal in vitamins. Vacuum dried and then air dried to restore its original moisture content, it is subsequently hulled and its bran removed, yielding a product that retains 80 percent of the natural B vitamins found in rough rice, or paddy.
Less than one-fourth of Americans have "good" diets according to results of a nutrition study begun in 1941.
"Recommended Daily Allowances" (RDAs) published for the first time by the Food and Nutrition Board, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council are weighted on the high side: 70 grams of protein, 3,300 calories per day for a 70-kilo man, and high levels of vitamins and minerals. The recommendations are based on the needs of fast-growing teenage boys, many of them suffering from malnutrition after years of economic depression and headed into the armed forces; they will be modified in 1944 and several times in future years, but always at relatively high levels (see School Lunch Act, 1946).
Former Yale chemistry professor and nutrition pioneer Russell Chittenden dies of pneumonia at his native New Haven December 26 at age 87.