The training of dieticians; the current position.

There is no possibility of carrying out the difficult work with any simplified ready reckoner about diet. We have had to part with the 19th century outlook which was wrong and inadequate very largely because it attempted too great a simplification. The objections were obvious; yet people chose to overlook them, and went on for years with a simplification which would not explain the fach. It was at variance with the fairly competent knowledge of the ordinary housewife. It would be a good thing if every dietician had to read the literature of the past. There is a book by one, Sir Henry Thompson (1885), which ran into four editions 60 years ago, in which he condemns the purchase of green, vegetables by the poor as a wasteful luxury, that, a t a time when it was already realized in this country that scurvy in infants really was scurvy and could be cured by appropriate diet. At present there is an attempt a t simplification by classifying foods as “body builders”, “protective foods” and “workers and warmers”. Take the body builders; the protein of yeast, by itself, is not a good protein for maintaining growth because it contains little methionine; the protein of white flour is defective because it contains little lysine; a mixture of the two is excellent for maintaining growth. Which is the “body builder”? It is rather like the question about Seidlitz powders: is it the blue packet or the white packet that makes the fizz? To play the part of practical adviser it is essential to keep pace with the whole of the science of nutrition with all its problems and uncertainties; there are no short cuts. I do not know whether, in the course of training, one can say that it is possible to teach perspective, but it is a most essential thing that a dietician actually practising should know when it is necessary to compromise, or advisable to compromise, in the interests of cooking facilities and expense, and when it is necessary for the dietician to dig in her toes. The future will bring a steadily growing demand for dieticians to hold posts which demand both knowledge and discretion. That was the result of over simplification.