• DOI:10.1093/AJCN/45.5.898
• Corpus ID: 4452690

Atwater: a personal tribute from the United Kingdom.

@article{Widdowson1987AtwaterAP,
  title={Atwater: a personal tribute from the United Kingdom.},
  author={ElsieM. Widdowson},
  journal={The American journal of clinical nutrition},
  year={1987},
  volume={45 5},
  pages={
          898-904
        }
}

• E. Widdowson
• Published 1 May 1987
• History
• The American journal of clinical nutrition

When Dr Nelson telephoned me and invited me to give the 1986 Atwater lecture, he told me, by way of persuading me, that I could talk about anything I liked. I replied that if I was giving a lecture in honor of Atwater, Atwater should be the cornerstone of it, and that is how it is going to be. More than 30 years ago I wrote “I think I can safely say that Atwater contributed more to our knowledge about the energy value of human foods than anyone who has ever lived, either before or since his time” (1). That is still true andit is also true that he made a great contribution to our knowledge about other aspects of nutrition as well. That is why I am delighted to pay my personal tribute to Atwater from the United Kingdom. The story of Atwater’s achievements begins in Germany. By the middle of the 19th century, Germany was in the forefront of studies on the metabolism of energy in man and animals and on the energy value of foods. After Atwater obtained his PhD degree in 1869 at the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, where he worked under Samuel Johnson, he travelled to Germany and spent 2 years in Berlin and Leipzig. Atwater was following the example of his teacher, for Samuel Johnson had previously spent 2 years in Germany, from 1853 to 1855, studying under Erdmann in Leipzig and Liebig in Munich. Travelling to Europe must have been quite an undertaking in those days and time consuming too. Nevertheless, Atwater made several journeys to Germany and on later visits he spent some time in Munich with Voit and Rubner, and this experience shaped the whole of his scientific career. Rubner had done much work on the composition of foods (2, 3). He analyzed foods for water, nitrogen, and fat, calculated protein from the nitrogen, and assumed that the remainder was carbohydrate. He also constructed a bomb calorimeter in which he had measured the heats of combustion of various proteins, fats, and carbohydrates and of the organic material in urine and feces; from these values he calculated the calorific value of foods for man. Voit (4) measured the amounts of food that laborers and other people ate and he used Rubner’s figures to calculate their intakes of protein, fat, carbohydrate, and calories. By 1873 Atwater had returned to America and was appointed Professor of Chemistry at Wesleyan University. When the Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station was set up in 1887, Atwater became its first director and he remained there for 14 years. It was there that he did his most important work and we can see throughout how his experiences in Germany influenced what he did. We must never forget the debt that Atwater owed to Rubner. Several aspects of Atwater’s work at Storrs have been of particular interest to me. One was his study of the composition of American food materials. Atwater saw the need for information on the composition of American foods for, as he wrote (5) “Until about the year 1880, those who wished to know about the chemical composition and nutritive values of food materials were compelled to depend upon analyses of European products, and most of those analyses had been made in German laboratories.” In 1896 Atwater and Wood (6) published the results of about 2600 analyses of American foods. The Bulletin was revised and extended and a second edition by Atwater and Bryant was published in 1899 (5). A third corrected version appeared in 1906 (7). This version, like the previous ones, was a compilation of analyses made in Atwater’s department and of analytical results from other laboratories. He tells us in the introduction that over 80% of the figures for meat and some 15% of those for other foods came from analyses made by himself and his associates. Atwater died in 1907 at the age of 63, a year after the third revision of his food tables appeared, and for many years his tables were widely used