McCarrison's Legacy: From Coonoor to the National Institute of Nutrition

Robert McCarrison retired from the Indian Medical Service in 1935, but the work he started did not stop with him. The small laboratory he had opened in a single room of the Pasteur Institute at Coonoor in 1918 grew into the Nutrition Research Laboratories, moved to Hyderabad in 1958, and in 1969 became the National Institute of Nutrition — the body that still calls him “the father of nutrition research in India”. In Britain, meanwhile, his 1936 Cantor Lectures and a run of papers in the British Medical Journal carried his message about whole food to doctors, farmers and the reading public.

This page follows what came after him: the institution in India, the way his successor W. R. Aykroyd weighed his achievement, the lectures and advocacy of his British years, the whole-food and soil writers who adopted him and the society that bears his name, and how historians of colonial India read his work today. It then looks at two stories that grew around his Himalayan years — the Hunza longevity legend and the goitre of the Gilgit valleys — and ends with what modern studies of whole grains and fibre have reported. His life is told on the Life and Career page, his rat-feeding experiments on The Coonoor Diet Experiments, and his goitre and whole-food science on Whole Food, Iodine and Goitre.

Table of Contents

  1. Aykroyd and the Nutrition Research Laboratories
  2. Coonoor to Hyderabad: the National Institute of Nutrition
  3. “Father of Nutrition Research in India”
  4. Nutrition and National Health: the Message in Britain
  5. Soil, Food and the McCarrison Society
  6. How Historians Read McCarrison
  7. The Hunza Legend After McCarrison
  8. Iodised Salt in Gilgit and Hunza
  9. Whole Grains and Fibre in Modern Studies
  10. Key Research Papers
  11. Connections

1. Aykroyd and the Nutrition Research Laboratories

By the time McCarrison left India the Coonoor unit had come a long way from its beginnings. It had started in 1918 as the “Beriberi Inquiry”, McCarrison and a single assistant working in one room. It was closed in the early 1920s (Aykroyd dates the axing to 1922, the institute’s own centenary history to 1923), revived in 1925 as the Deficiency Disease Enquiry, and in 1929 renamed the Nutrition Research Laboratories of the Indian Research Fund Association, with McCarrison as its first director. According to the National Institute of Nutrition’s centenary paper of 2018, by 1935 the laboratories occupied six rooms, including a lecture hall and a nutrition museum.

The directorship then passed to W. R. Aykroyd, the British nutritionist who, as his own memoir puts it, later “assisted at the birth” of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Aykroyd knew McCarrison’s work from the inside, and it was he who wrote the long memoir of McCarrison published in the British Journal of Nutrition in 1960, the year of McCarrison’s death. That memoir remains the main first-hand account of his career and the source for much of what is known of him.

Aykroyd’s three-part assessment

Aykroyd summed up McCarrison’s contribution under three heads. First, McCarrison showed that faulty diets made up of ordinary natural foods damage the body in numerous ways, and he was the first to use that method — feeding animals the real diets of real peoples rather than purified mixtures — on an extensive scale. Second, he created public awareness, “not only in India”, that health depends on food. Third, he founded an institution that remained a leading centre of nutrition research.

Aykroyd also recorded reservations about particular experiments, and they are part of the documented record. He judged the comparisons of grain grown with farmyard manure and with chemical fertiliser to be “of doubtful statistical validity”, the conclusion linking vitamin A deficiency to bladder stone to be “out of line with epidemiological facts”, and the reproduction of the Travancore peptic-ulcer pattern in rats to be “unconvincing” — while describing the method itself as original. On the old complaint that colonial officials had starved McCarrison’s work of money, Aykroyd added his own view that “too much has been made of the obscurantism of the authorities”.

McCarrison had made the institutional case himself. In a 1927 memorandum to the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, quoted by Aykroyd, he wrote that “Malnutrition is the chief among the problems facing those engaged in agricultural research” — a statement of the link between farming and health that ran through all his later writing.

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2. Coonoor to Hyderabad: the National Institute of Nutrition

Coonoor, a hill station in the Nilgiri Hills, was where McCarrison had come to convalesce in 1918, and the laboratories stayed there for four decades. In 1946 the Bhore Committee recommended that they be moved. The move took place in 1958, when the Nutrition Research Laboratories left the Nilgiris for Hyderabad, according to the institute’s own histories.

In 1969 the laboratories were renamed the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN). The institute marked its centenary in 2018, counting its history from McCarrison’s one-room Beriberi Inquiry of 1918. Two papers written for that anniversary — Gavaravarapu and Hemalatha in the Indian Journal of Medical Research (2018), and Longvah and Rajendran in Maternal & Child Nutrition (2020) — trace the line from Coonoor to Hyderabad and set out the dates used on this page.

The questions McCarrison had asked at Coonoor were what the people of India actually ate, what those diets lacked, and what difference the food made to health. His own approach — studying real regional diets, as prepared and cooked by the people who ate them — is described on the Coonoor Diet Experiments page.

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3. “Father of Nutrition Research in India”

The National Institute of Nutrition calls McCarrison “the father of nutrition research in India”, and the title appears in its centenary paper of 2018. The title reflects that the institute counts its own beginning from his one-room inquiry of 1918. The two Parlakimedi Research Fellowships, funded in 1926 by a gift of a lakh of rupees from the Rajah of Parlakimedi during the Royal Commission’s visit, were, according to Aykroyd, the first research fellowships in India supported by private donation.

Recognition from India continued after his retirement. In 1953, on his seventy-fifth birthday, colleagues presented him with The Work of Sir Robert McCarrison, a collection of his writings edited by Hugh Sinclair, with introductory essays by Aykroyd and by the American nutrition scientist E. V. McCollum. Aykroyd records that McCarrison received a telegram of thanks from India’s Health Minister, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. The same year the Nutrition Society made him an Honorary Member.

When he died at Oxford on 18 May 1960, obituaries appeared in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, Nature (written by Sinclair) and the British Journal of Nutrition (Aykroyd), and a memoir followed in the transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1961. Writing from India more than thirty years later, C. Gopalan — himself a former director of the National Institute of Nutrition — titled his 1992 tribute “Food and health — McCarrison’s prescription endures”.

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4. Nutrition and National Health: the Message in Britain

Back in Britain after 1935, McCarrison turned from the laboratory to the lecture hall. In 1936 he gave the Cantor Lectures before the Royal Society of Arts in London under the title Nutrition and National Health. The lectures set out, for a general audience, the results of his Coonoor experiments: the seven regional Indian diets fed to seven groups of rats, the Sikh-diet stock colony, the comparison with a poor English diet of white bread, margarine, sweetened tea and tinned meat, and his conclusion that the faults of real diets were usually multiple deficiencies combined with an excess of carbohydrate. The lectures were republished by Faber & Faber in 1953.

In the lectures he described the Sikhs’ takatwar khurak, “foods that give strength” — milk and milk products and fresh vegetables — and added that “nowadays we speak of them as ‘the protective foods’”. He listed thirty-six substances then known to be essential and suggested that “something in the freshness of food” also counted, a speculation he presented as such.

The same message reached doctors through the British Medical Journal. A paper under the title “Nutrition and National Health” appeared there in February 1936, followed by “Nutrition in Health and Disease” later that year and “Medical Aspects of the Use of Food” in June 1940. After the Second World War he became, in his late sixties, the first Director of Post-Graduate Medical Education at the University of Oxford, a post he held from 1945 to 1955. One of his last indexed papers, written with P. Dorolle and published in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society in 1956, dealt with international co-operation in nutrition.

He practised what he described. Aykroyd records that, “remembering the Hunzas”, McCarrison breakfasted on whole-wheat chapattis, and that he told missionaries he was a missionary too, with the text “Hearken diligently unto me and eat ye that which is good” (Isaiah 55:2).

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5. Soil, Food and the McCarrison Society

One strand of McCarrison’s work found a second life outside medicine. In the Cantor Lectures and in a 1924 BMJ paper on “The Relation of Manure to the Nutritive and Vitamin Value of Certain Grain”, he reported that grain grown with farmyard manure was of higher nutritive value in his rat tests than grain grown with chemical fertiliser, that rice grown in standing water was less nutritious than rain-grown rice, and that spinach from a well-tended, manured garden was richer in vitamin C. In his account, the quality of food began with the soil it grew in.

That idea made him a figure of reference for the soil and whole-food writers of the mid-twentieth century; Aykroyd noted in 1960 that the manure experiments were “often quoted by ‘return to Mother Earth’ enthusiasts”, while himself judging them, as noted above, of doubtful statistical validity. The debate continued long after his death: in 1999 the journal Nutrition and Health published W. W. Yellowlees’s paper “McCarrison, farmyard manure and the future”, returning to exactly those experiments.

A society bearing his name was founded in 1966 — the McCarrison Society, according to Wikipedia’s account; the Dictionary of Ulster Biography says only that “a society bearing his name was subsequently established in London”. The journal Nutrition and Health carried both Gopalan’s 1992 tribute and Yellowlees’s 1999 paper, so his work was still being discussed there decades after his death.

The same tradition links him with other whole-food physicians on this site: the dentist Weston A. Price, who travelled to isolated peoples in the 1930s; the Swiss physician Max Bircher-Benner; and the German hygienist Werner Kollath, founder of German whole-food nutrition.

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6. How Historians Read McCarrison

Historians of medicine in colonial India have given McCarrison a central place. David Arnold’s 1994 article in the Indian Economic and Social History Review, “The ‘discovery’ of malnutrition and diet in colonial India”, addresses, as its title says, the interwar “discovery” of malnutrition and diet as a problem in colonial India, a story in which McCarrison’s Coonoor work is a central episode. In a 2010 paper in Medical History on the “beriberi problem” in British India, Arnold notes that McCarrison’s photographs of rats raised on a “Sikh” diet beside rats raised on a poor “Madrasi” diet offered “clear ocular testimony” — a picture anyone could understand — and records McCarrison’s view that beriberi in India predated mechanised rice milling and was largely confined to the Northern Circars.

A. Malhotra’s 2021 article in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, “Cutting Edge Research in the Contact Zone?”, examines, as its title says, the establishment of the Coonoor laboratories between 1925 and 1927, the years after the closed Beriberi Inquiry was revived as the Deficiency Disease Enquiry. The period language of McCarrison’s writing — his ranking of the diets of named Indian communities — is itself part of what historians of colonial science study.

Nutrition scientists have read him differently, as a forerunner. Gopalan’s 1992 tribute argues by its title that “McCarrison’s prescription endures”. A. R. Walker’s 2002 paper in Nutrition, “The assessment and remedying of inadequate diets in India, as appreciated by Sir Robert McCarrison”, returns to his analysis of where Indian diets fell short. The Wellcome Collection in London holds his papers (archive GC/205), including 149 posters of his nutrition observations and experiments from 1913 to about 1947 and an album of Coonoor photographs, a resource for later historians.

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7. The Hunza Legend After McCarrison

The most widely repeated part of McCarrison’s legacy comes from a single passage. In Studies in Deficiency Disease (1921), describing the people of Hunza in the Gilgit region where he had served as Agency Surgeon, he wrote of “a race, unsurpassed in perfection of physique and in freedom from disease in general”, whose food was grains, vegetables and fruit with some milk and butter and goat’s meat only on feast days. He wrote that “the span of life is extraordinarily long” and that “Appendicitis, so common in Europe, was unknown.” Aykroyd called this acquaintance with Hunza “the key to much of his later work”. These were McCarrison’s own observations as a doctor living among the people, and they are quoted here as his.

Later popular writers carried the passage much further. According to Wikipedia’s article on Hunza (Burusho) cuisine, authors including J. I. Rodale and G. T. Wrench popularised the idea of Hunza as a valley of exceptionally long-lived people, with claims of ages well beyond a hundred. Wikipedia states that there is no reliable documentation of the alleged ages. McCarrison’s own phrase was that the span of life was long; the specific extreme ages came from later authors, not from him.

The problem of unrecorded ages is not unique to Hunza. A study of a different “longevity valley”, Vilcabamba in Ecuador — not Hunza — is the indexed parallel. R. B. Mazess and S. H. Forman, reporting in the Journal of Gerontology in 1979, found systematic exaggeration of age after about seventy; the reported ages over a hundred were incorrect or unsubstantiated, and they found no evidence of unusual longevity in the village. The Vilcabamba study is not evidence about Hunza itself; it is the kind of finding that explains why undocumented extreme ages are treated with caution by researchers on ageing.

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8. Iodised Salt in Gilgit and Hunza

McCarrison’s first major scientific paper, published in 1906, was “Observations on Endemic Goitre in the Chitral and Gilgit Valleys”. He spent years surveying goitre and cretinism in those mountains and held that its causes were multiple — iodine shortage, goitre-promoting substances in food, and impure water among them (see Whole Food, Iodine and Goitre). The later history of the same valleys picks up that thread.

In 1972 the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published a survey of endemic goitre in the Gilgit Agency, by then part of West Pakistan, by J. A. Chapman and colleagues. Twenty years later, a 1992 paper in the Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association by A. Ali and colleagues reported on the effect of a long-term supply of iodised salt to the endemic-goitre area of Gilgit and Hunza. In the populations they studied, visible goitre had stood at 61.36% before iodised salt; after twelve years of supply it was 4.68%. The same survey found, by urinary iodine, that 70.41% of households still showed mild to severe iodine deficiency.

These findings are consistent with McCarrison’s own goitre surveys in the region: he described goitre in the Gilgit and Chitral valleys from his first years there. In modern terms, iodine deficiency is described in a 2008 Lancet review by Zimmermann and colleagues as the most common preventable cause of mental impairment worldwide, with salt iodisation the main strategy for its control. The site’s Iodine and Goiter pages cover the mineral and the condition in detail.

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9. Whole Grains and Fibre in Modern Studies

McCarrison’s central comparison was between whole and refined food: whole wheat freshly ground into atta against white flour, and the whole-wheat staple of the north against rice that had been milled or polished and washed in many changes of water. In his rat experiments, as he reported them in the Cantor Lectures, young rats on white-flour diets had 30% mortality against 4% on whole-wheat-flour diets. Modern research has asked a related question in people, using very different methods: large prospective studies that follow what people eat and what happens to their health.

A 2016 systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis in the BMJ by Dagfinn Aune and colleagues pooled 45 prospective studies. Each additional 90 grams a day of whole grain was associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease (relative risk 0.81) and of death from all causes (relative risk 0.83). The authors found little association for refined grains or white rice.

A 2019 series of systematic reviews and meta-analyses in The Lancet by Andrew Reynolds and colleagues drew on 185 prospective studies and 58 clinical trials. People with the highest dietary fibre intakes had 15–30% lower all-cause and cardiovascular mortality and lower rates of coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and colorectal cancer than those with the lowest intakes, with similar findings for whole grains. The authors graded the certainty of the evidence as moderate for fibre and low to moderate for whole grains.

These are associations in observational studies, not proof of cause, and they measure people rather than rats. They do not test McCarrison’s experiments directly. What they show is that the question he put at the centre of his work — whether the whole grain and the refined grain lead to different health — is still being studied, now with population data on a scale he did not have. The site’s Whole Grain vs Refined Wheat and Dietary Fiber pages cover this research in more depth.

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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 Relation of Manure to the Nutritive and Vitamin Value of Certain Grain. Br Med J. 1924;1(3300):567-9. PubMed PMID: 20771526
  3. McCarrison R. Nutrition and National Health. Br Med J. 1936;1(3921):427-430. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.1.3921.427
  4. McCarrison R. Nutrition in Health and Disease. Br Med J. 1936;2(3951):611-5. PubMed PMID: 20780124
  5. McCarrison R. Medical Aspects of the Use of Food. Br Med J. 1940;1(4145):984-7. PubMed PMID: 20783158
  6. 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
  7. Sinclair HM. Sir Robert McCarrison, C.I.E. Nature. 1960;187(4733):195-196. DOI: 10.1038/187195a0
  8. Gopalan C. Food and health—McCarrison’s prescription endures. Nutr Health. 1992;8(1):1-16. PubMed PMID: 1318529
  9. Yellowlees WW. McCarrison, farmyard manure and the future. Nutr Health. 1999;13(1):23-9. PubMed PMID: 10376276
  10. Walker AR. The assessment and remedying of inadequate diets in India, as appreciated by Sir Robert McCarrison. Nutrition. 2002;18(1):106-9. PubMed PMID: 11827781
  11. Arnold D. The ‘discovery’ of malnutrition and diet in colonial India. Indian Econ Soc Hist Rev. 1994;31(1):1-26. DOI: 10.1177/001946469403100101
  12. Arnold D. British India and the “beriberi problem”, 1798-1942. Med Hist. 2010;54(3):295-314. PubMed PMID: 20592882
  13. Malhotra A. Cutting Edge Research in the Contact Zone? The Establishment of the Nutritional Research Laboratories in Coonoor (1925–27). South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. 2021;44(1):117-134. DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1863493
  14. 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
  15. Longvah T, Rajendran A. Commemorating NIN@100: Empowering the nation through nutrition 1918-2018. Matern Child Nutr. 2020;16 Suppl 3:e13116. PubMed PMID: 33347717
  16. Mazess RB, Forman SH. Longevity and age exaggeration in Vilcabamba, Ecuador. J Gerontol. 1979;34(1):94-8. PubMed PMID: 759498
  17. Chapman JA, Grant IS, Taylor G, Mahmud K, Mulk SU, Shahid MA. Endemic goitre in the Gilgit Agency, West Pakistan with an appendix on dermatoglyphics and taste-testing. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1972;263(856):459-90. PubMed PMID: 4401218
  18. Ali A, Khan MM, Malik ZU, Charania BA, Bhojani FA, Baig SM. Impact of the long term supply of iodized salt to the endemic goitre area. J Pak Med Assoc. 1992;42(6):138-40. PubMed PMID: 1369614
  19. Zimmermann MB, Jooste PL, Pandav CS. Iodine-deficiency disorders. Lancet. 2008;372(9645):1251-62. PubMed PMID: 18676011
  20. Aune D, Keum N, Giovannucci E, Fadnes LT, Boffetta P, Greenwood DC, Tonstad S, Vatten LJ, Riboli E, Norat T. Whole grain consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and all cause and cause specific mortality: systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis of prospective studies. BMJ. 2016;353:i2716. PubMed PMID: 27301975
  21. Reynolds A, Mann J, Cummings J, Winter N, Mete E, Te Morenga L. Carbohydrate quality and human health: a series of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Lancet. 2019;393(10170):434-445. PubMed PMID: 30638909

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=McCarrison+R%5Bau%5D
  2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=McCarrison+history
  3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=endemic+goitre+Gilgit
  4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=whole+grain+mortality+meta-analysis
  5. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=age+exaggeration+longevity

Further Reading

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Connections

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