There were many women scientists still living at the outbreak of war who changed the world forever. There was our own incredible Elizabeth Garratt Anderson; a physician and feminist, she was the first Englishwoman to qualify as a physician and surgeon in Britain and the co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women.

And then there was double Nobel prize-winning Marie Curie, a physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. During the First World War this Frenchwoman worked to develop small, mobile X-ray units that could be used to diagnose injuries near the battlefront.

There was also Elsie Widdowson, who at the outbreak of war, may have only been an eight-year-old, but she would grow into an inspirational scientist who would shape the lives of people during the Second World War and the years since.

Elsie was tasked with working out what and how much food people could live on and still be healthy – the Ration Diet. Thanks to rationing it is thought that the post-war British population was fitter and healthier, despite the years of trauma they were leaving behind, than we are today.

Elsie is a particularly interesting character because she was a female scientist working in a lab – there weren’t many back then – and because she was incredibly dedicated to doing the best job she could. In fact she, and a team of her colleagues, trialled the ration diet that they had developed on themselves to be sure that it was safe.

They undertook a series of fitness tests during the trial and were surprised to find that they performed better on the ration diet. It was on the basis of these results that Elsie and her team felt confident to recommend to the government the sort of diet that would work in a time of food shortage.

Unfortunately neither the government nor the scientists anticipated just how long rationing would be needed. After a few years, when the rations were running low and having to be dished out in ever diminishing quantities, the nutritionally balanced ration diet was difficult to maintain.

It seems that the cities in particular suffered from the shortage because they weren’t able to supplement the rations with produce from their own gardens. Nowadays, we are constantly bombarded with information on diets, superfoods, foods that are out and foods that are in.

Like ballet flats and platform shoes, most of the big name diets are merely a fashion.

If you do a bit of digging you can usually find as many advocates against any diet as you can for it. To complicate matters further we have access to such an enormous selection of foods.

The choice of food, fresh and processed, has increased immeasurably over the past 50 years. The idea of small quantities of a limited selection of food seems almost impossible to imagine. Even things like bananas, which are in constant supply in our house, were a cherished rarity in post-war Britain.

With this deluge of information and food it is hard to see how we could get back to a ration type diet. But if you think about it the motto “Anything in moderation” could be the solution – we have pretty much anything to choose from and we can take on the science of the ration diet by eating smaller quantities.

Elsie was a real pioneer and earned many honours in her life. She contributed a huge amount to the field of nutrition and dietetics. She was a woman who helped raise the population of Britain out of the darkness of World War II with perfect portions of determination and dedication and with lashings of science.

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