McCarrison Society

Health Through Nutrition, A Birthright

About The McCarrison Society

Today, the ethics and fundamentals of the McCarrison Society are needed more than ever before and not just for the leading affluent countries. Peoples worldwide are facing a serious challenge from the rise in non-communicable diseases. These diseases now cause a greater mortality and burden of ill health than tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS, and all other infectious diseases combined. The recent rise in mental ill health to the top three of the global burden of ill health turns the scenario into a grave and sinister outlook if the challenge is ignored.

Many scientists were driven in the early part of last century to discover new vitamins and unravel their chemistry.

Vitamins were found to be the cause of single disease entities:

  • Vitamin C and scurvy, vitamin D and rickets, vitamin A and blindness, B vitamins and beri-beri.
  • Vitamin B12 was the last to have its structure defined in the 1940s. Once done, the conclusion drawn was that we now know everything about nutrition, and medical research turned to the genome. That phase has only just ended. The much feted call for post-genome research to find the gene for obesity and the other ills of modern life is now in full gear.

Sir Robert, however, had worked on a different dimension. As a medical major in the army, responsible for the soldiers and local staff, he recognised that many diseases afflicted the city dwellers of India whilst the children and people of the villages were robust and healthy. His experiment with a thousand rats or more, fed the diets of the city and the village, showed you could produce the diseases of the city by feeding the city diet.

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