Sir Robert McCarrison: Hunza, Coonoor and the Science of Whole Food

Table of Contents

1. Deep-Dive Articles
2. Who Was Robert McCarrison?
3. The Frontier Valleys and the Hunza
4. The Coonoor Experiments on One Page
5. The Natural Source: Whole Food, Soil and Iodine
6. Timeline at a Glance
7. Later Significance
8. Key Research Papers
9. Connections

Deep-Dive Articles

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1. Who Was Robert McCarrison?

Robert McCarrison was born on 15 March 1878 at Portadown, County Armagh, the second son of a flax expert associated with the Belfast linen industry. He studied at Queen’s College, Belfast, worked as a student at the Richmond Hospital in Dublin, and qualified in medicine in 1900 through the Royal University of Ireland. A few months later he passed the examination for the Indian Medical Service, and by his own account, quoted by Aykroyd, he sailed for India on his twenty-third birthday, in March 1901.

His career ran from the frontier to the laboratory. He served first in Chitral and then as Agency Surgeon in Gilgit, where he was the only doctor for the troops and the local people. Goitre and cretinism became his first great subject, and in 1913 he was placed on special duty to investigate them; the Academy of Medicine of Paris awarded him the Prix Amussat in 1914. After illness contracted on war service he came to Coonoor in 1918 to convalesce and stayed until he retired in 1935, building what became the Nutrition Research Laboratories, with himself as first director from 1929. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire, knighted in 1933, and retired as a Major-General. In 1936 he gave the Cantor Lectures, “Nutrition and National Health”, before the Royal Society of Arts in London; from 1945 to 1955 he was the first Director of Post-Graduate Medical Education at the University of Oxford. He died in Oxford on 18 May 1960, aged 82.

The full story, including his Sikh assistant Mula Singh and the gift of a lakh of rupees from a member of the Royal Commission on Agriculture in 1926, is in Life and Career.

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2. The Frontier Valleys and the Hunza

McCarrison later described the remote valleys of his first postings as places “where nature makes large-scale experiments upon man”. One people in particular stayed with him. In Studies in Deficiency Disease (1921) he wrote of the Hunza as “a race, unsurpassed in perfection of physique and in freedom from disease in general, whose sole food consists … of grains, vegetables and fruits, with a certain amount of milk and butter, and goat’s meat only on feast days”. He listed their grains as wheat, barley and maize, and described “an abundant crop of apricots” dried in the sun. During “some seven years spent in their midst”, he wrote, his work among them was chiefly accidents, senile cataract and operations on the eyelids, and “Appendicitis, so common in Europe, was unknown.”

Aykroyd called this acquaintance with the Hunza “the key to much of his later work”. The diet McCarrison later chose for his healthy stock rats at Coonoor was a Sikh-type diet which, in Aykroyd’s words, resembled “that of the Hunzas whom he never forgot”. Aykroyd also records that McCarrison, “remembering the Hunzas”, breakfasted on whole wheat chappatis. The way later popular writers turned the Hunza into a longevity legend is told neutrally in the legacy article.

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3. The Coonoor Experiments on One Page

Most nutrition laboratories of the time fed animals purified, synthetic diets with one nutrient removed. McCarrison did something different: he fed rats, pigeons, monkeys and other animals on diets made “from foodstuffs in common use by the people of India”, prepared and cooked as the people prepared them, to see what relation each people’s food had to its diseases. The faults of real diets, he said, were “usually those of multiple deficiencies combined with carbohydrate excess”.

The main results, as he reported them in the 1936 Cantor Lectures:

• Seven diets, seven groups. Seven groups of twenty young rats, matched for age, sex and weight, each ate the diet of one community — Sikh, Pathan, Mahratta, Goorkha, Kanarese, Bengali and Madrassi. After 140 days, which he equated with nearly twelve human years, the diets ranked in that order of nutritive value, the whole-wheat, milk, pulse and vegetable diet of the north at the top and the polished-rice diet of the south at the bottom.
• The stock colony. About a thousand stock rats lived on a Sikh-type diet of chapattis with fresh butter, sprouted Bengal gram, raw cabbage and carrots, milk and, once a week, meat with bone. In the five years before he left India he reported no case of illness, no death from natural causes, and no maternal or infant mortality in this stock.
• Sikh diet against a poor English diet. Twenty rats ate the Sikh diet and twenty a diet modelled on that of the poorer classes in England (white bread, margarine, sweetened tea, boiled cabbage and potato, tinned meat and jam) for 187 days. He reported that the English-diet group grew poorly, was nervous, and from about the sixtieth day began to kill and eat its weaker members, with lung and gut disease far commoner than in the Sikh-diet group.
• White flour against whole wheat. Young rats on white-flour diets showed 30% mortality, usually from pneumonia, against 4% on whole-wheat-flour diets.
• Peptic ulcer. Over close on 700 days, ulcers appeared in 0% of rats on the Sikh diet with extra milk, 11% on a poor Madras diet and 29% on a tapioca-based Travancore diet.

Every figure, every diet and the full list of maladies he recorded is in The Coonoor Diet Experiments.

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4. The Natural Source: Whole Food, Soil and Iodine

The thread through all of McCarrison’s work is food as it comes from the field. The diet he ranked best was built on whole wheat freshly ground into atta and made into chapattis, milk and milk products such as ghee, curds and buttermilk, dhal (pulses), vegetables and fruit. The diet he ranked worst was built on rice that had been parboiled, milled or polished, washed in many changes of water and boiled, with little milk and few fresh vegetables. The Sikhs, he noted, called milk, milk products and fresh vegetables takatwar khurak, “foods that give strength”, and added that “nowadays we speak of them as ‘the protective foods’”. He counted thirty-six essentials known in his day, including the vitamins A, B, C, D and E, and speculated that “something in the freshness of food” added a further value.

He carried the same idea back into the soil. He reported that grain grown with farmyard manure was of higher nutritive quality than grain grown with chemical manure, and that rice grown in standing water was less nutritious than rain-grown rice. And he never left goitre behind: he accepted that iodine deficiency was a cause, but held that “The causes of goitre … are multiple and their effects manifold”, pointing to goitrogenic agents in foods such as cabbage and to impure drinking water. Aykroyd records that McCarrison’s own thyroid swelled during an experiment in which he drank the “suspended matter” from the water of a goitrous village.

The science is explained in Whole Food, Iodine and Goitre, which also reports neutrally what later research found about iodine deficiency and iodised salt.

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5. Timeline at a Glance

• 1878 — Born 15 March at Portadown, County Armagh.
• 1900 — Qualifies in medicine through the Royal University of Ireland.
• 1901 — Sails for India on his twenty-third birthday, in the Indian Medical Service.
• 1904 — Agency Surgeon in Gilgit; goitre and cretinism studies in the frontier valleys.
• 1906 — Publishes “Observations on Endemic Goitre in the Chitral and Gilgit Valleys”; marries Helen Stella Johnson.
• 1913 — Special duty to investigate goitre and cretinism in India.
• 1914 — Prix Amussat of the Academy of Medicine of Paris.
• 1918 — Comes to Coonoor to convalesce; the Beriberi Inquiry opens in one room of the Pasteur Institute.
• 1921 — Studies in Deficiency Disease; lecture tour of the United States.
• Early 1920s — The Beriberi Inquiry is closed (1922 per Aykroyd, 1923 per the National Institute of Nutrition) and restored as the Deficiency Diseases Enquiry in 1925.
• 1926 — The Royal Commission on Agriculture in India visits Coonoor; the Parlakimedi gift funds two research fellowships.
• 1929 — The unit becomes the Nutrition Research Laboratories, with McCarrison as first director.
• 1933 — Knighted.
• 1935 — Retires from the Indian Medical Service as a Major-General.
• 1936 — Cantor Lectures, “Nutrition and National Health”, Royal Society of Arts.
• 1945–1955 — First Director of Post-Graduate Medical Education, University of Oxford.
• 1953 — The Work of Sir Robert McCarrison presented on his seventy-fifth birthday; Cantor Lectures republished by Faber.
• 1958 — The laboratories move from Coonoor to Hyderabad.
• 1960 — Dies at Oxford on 18 May, aged 82.
• 1969 — The laboratories are renamed the National Institute of Nutrition.

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6. Later Significance

The institution McCarrison started in a single room now stands as India’s National Institute of Nutrition in Hyderabad, which describes him as “the father of nutrition research in India”. Aykroyd summed up his contribution in three parts: he showed, using the method more extensively than anyone before him, that faulty diets made of natural foods damage the body in numerous ways; he made the public, “not only in India”, aware that health depends on food; and he founded an institution that remained a leading centre of nutrition research. Aykroyd also recorded reservations about some individual experiments alongside that praise, and they are reported, attributed, in the legacy article.

Historians have placed McCarrison at the centre of the interwar “discovery” of malnutrition in colonial India; David Arnold notes that his photographs of rats fed on Sikh and poor Madras diets gave “clear ocular testimony” of what food could do. Later nutrition scientists, among them C. Gopalan, a former director of the National Institute of Nutrition, wrote that “McCarrison’s prescription endures”. Large modern studies of whole grains and fibre, which report lower rates of heart disease and death among people with the highest intakes, are summarised as associations, with their certainty grading, in McCarrison’s Legacy.

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Key Research Papers

1. McCarrison R. Observations on Endemic Goitre in the Chitral and Gilgit Valleys. Med Chir Trans. 1906;89:437-70. PubMed PMID: 20897060
2. McCarrison R. The Effects of Deficient Dietaries on Monkeys. Br Med J. 1920;1(3086):249-53. PubMed PMID: 20769796
3. McCarrison R. A Good Diet and a Bad One: An Experimental Contrast. Br Med J. 1926;2(3433):724.2-732. PubMed PMID: 20772829
4. McCarrison R. White and Brown Bread. Br Med J. 1929;2(3593):913-4. PubMed PMID: 20775068
5. McCarrison R. A Paper on Food and Goitre. Br Med J. 1933;2(3797):671-5. PubMed PMID: 20777816
6. McCarrison R. Nutrition and National Health. Br Med J. 1936;1(3921):427-430. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.1.3921.427
7. Aykroyd WR. Major-General Robert McCarrison, Kt, C.I.E., M.A., M.D., D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.C.P. (15 March 1878–18 May 1960). Br J Nutr. 1960;14:413-418. DOI: 10.1079/bjn19600055
8. Gopalan C. Food and health--McCarrison’s prescription endures. Nutr Health. 1992;8(1):1-16. PubMed PMID: 1318529
9. Arnold D. British India and the “beriberi problem”, 1798-1942. Med Hist. 2010;54(3):295-314. PubMed PMID: 20592882
10. Gavaravarapu SM, Hemalatha R. National Institute of Nutrition: 100 years of empowering the nation through nutrition. Indian J Med Res. 2018;148(5):477-487. PubMed PMID: 30666974

PubMed Topic Searches

1. McCarrison R as author
2. McCarrison history
3. Endemic goitre in Gilgit
4. Beriberi history in India

Further Reading

• McCarrison R. Studies in Deficiency Disease. London: Oxford Medical Publications; 1921.
• McCarrison R. Nutrition and National Health: the Cantor Lectures. Royal Society of Arts, 1936; republished London: Faber and Faber; 1953. https://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/McC/McCToC.html
• Sinclair HM, editor. The Work of Sir Robert McCarrison. London: Faber and Faber; 1953.
• Wellcome Collection archive GC/205: McCarrison, Sir Robert (1878–1960). https://atom.aim25.com/index.php/mccarrison-sir-robert-1878-1960

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Connections

• Nutrition and Orthomolecular
• Robert McCarrison: Life and Career
• The Coonoor Diet Experiments
• Whole Food, Iodine and Goitre
• McCarrison’s Legacy
• Dr. Weston A. Price
• Prof. Werner Kollath
• Dr. Max Bircher-Benner
• Goiter
• Iodine
• Wheat
• Brown Rice
• Apricots
• Vitamin B1 (Thiamine)

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