58 Facts About Elmer McCollum

Elmer Verner McCollum was an American biochemist known for his work on the influence of diet on health.

Elmer McCollum helped to discover vitaminB and vitaminD and worked out the effect of trace elements in the diet.

Elmer McCollum wrote in his 1918 medical textbook that lacto vegetarianism is, "when the diet is properly planned, the most highly satisfactory plan which can be adopted in the nutrition of man".

Elmer McCollum's ancestors immigrated to the United States from Scotland in 1763.

Elmer McCollum's parents had little education but became relatively well-off by local standards.

Elmer McCollum spent his first seventeen years on this farm and attended a one-room school.

Elmer McCollum failed the general certification examination, but was allowed to enter high school provisionally based on his habit of extensive reading and his memorization of standard poetry.

Elmer McCollum worked his way through high school and college, including time spent as a gas lamplighter.

Elmer McCollum secured a scholarship to Yale University in 1904, and wrote his thesis on pyrimidines.

Elmer McCollum remained for another year as a postdoctoral researcher working with Thomas Osborne and Lafayette Mendel on plant protein and diet.

In Wisconsin, McCollum was assigned to analyze cow feed and the animal's milk, blood, feces, and urine for the famous single-grain experiment, directed by department chief Stephen Babcock and his successor Edwin B Hart.

Elmer McCollum read of about 13 experiments done between 1873 and 1906 on small animals, often mice, fed restricted diets.

Elmer McCollum determined that he must find out what was lacking in their purified diets, and that he needed to experiment on animals with a short life span, finally deciding on rats.

Elmer McCollum replaced them with twelve young albino rats with some domestication that he bought for $6 from a Chicago pet store.

Elmer McCollum decided that some diets failed because they lacked "palatability".

Elmer McCollum thought that if a diet tasted good, and the animals ate more food, then nutrition would be adequate.

Further, Mendel and Osborne suggested in their papers that Elmer McCollum had been less than careful in his experiments.

Elmer McCollum was still responsible for the care of the heifers until 1911, and the care and feeding of his rats fell to a new volunteer, Marguerite Davis, a home economics-turned-biochemistry student who looked out for them daily, unpaid for five years.

Elmer McCollum earned $600 for her sixth and final year.

Davis helped Elmer McCollum develop "the biological method for the analysis of food", and she co-authored a number of papers.

Elmer McCollum thought that a professor succeeds with his students, "by his ability to make his conversations and lectures more interesting than song, dance, drink and fast driving".

Elmer McCollum opposed Casimir Funk's 1912 name vitamines.

Elmer McCollum was offered the chairmanship and a professorship, although he almost didn't get the job.

Elmer McCollum was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1920.

Elmer McCollum's work was on fluorine and the prevention of tooth decay, vitamins D and E, and the effect of a slew of trace minerals in nutrition, including aluminum, calcium, cobalt, phosphorus, potassium, manganese, sodium, strontium, and zinc.

McCollum worked with Herbert Hoover's US Food Administration to help those who were starving in Europe following World War I Hoover sent him on a lecture tour of all the major cities in the western US, where McCollum explained that the American diet was of poor quality, and that it would be better to eat organ meats, fewer potatoes, and less sugar.

Elmer McCollum's group tested more than 300 diets on rats, finally finding that cod-liver oil could prevent rickets.

Harry Day, a colleague and Elmer McCollum biographer, writes that finding vitaminD was the work of "a host of investigators" but that Elmer McCollum and his group did "much of the groundwork".

Kenneth Carpenter, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, writes in his article "The Nobel Prize and the Discovery of Vitamins" that "strangely" Elmer McCollum was not nominated for a Nobel Prize.

Elmer McCollum says there are about forty essential ingredients in the human diet: at least ten of the 22 amino acids, four vitamins that are fat-soluble, nine water-soluble vitamins, one fatty acid, dextrose, at least thirteen minerals, water, and oxygen.

Elmer McCollum then traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he attended the first awarding of the McCollum Award by what is today the American Society for Nutrition, sponsored by the National Dairy Council.

Elmer McCollum gave the Harvey Lectures in 1917, with the title, "The Supplementary Relations among Our Common Foodstuffs".

Elmer McCollum wrote that the American diet was of poor quality because it had too much "white flour or cornmeal, muscle meats, potatoes, and sugar".

Elmer McCollum encouraged a daily quart of milk and plenty of green, leafy vegetables.

Under the title "Our Daily Diet", between 1922 and 1946 Elmer McCollum wrote about 160 columns for McCall's magazine.

Elmer McCollum was the nutrition editor of the magazines McCall's and Parents.

Elmer McCollum was on the editorial boards of the Journal of Nutrition, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and Nutrition Reviews.

Long interested in the effect of diet on the teeth, Elmer McCollum was awarded medals by the Connecticut and Ohio dental societies and was a fellow of the New York society as well as an honorary member of the American Academy of Dental Medicine.

Elmer McCollum was moderator of "The Cause and Prevention of Dental Caries", sponsored by the Good Teeth Council for Children, Inc.

Elmer McCollum was critical of the decision; while he agreed that white bread has nutritional deficiencies, he felt that this action did not compensate for all of the nutrients that are stripped away by milling.

Elmer McCollum thought that doctors could stop false advertising by immediately establishing the facts of each new discovery.

Elmer McCollum then gave a long list of dos and don'ts with vitaminsA andB.

At seven months of age, Elmer McCollum fell ill with what we know today as scurvy when his mother became pregnant.

Elmer McCollum weaned him on mashed potatoes and boiled milk.

One day while his mother was peeling apples, Elmer McCollum started to suck on the peels.

Elmer McCollum completely recovered from scurvy, but his teeth caused him trouble for the rest of his life.

Elmer McCollum had a number of operations, and finally his descending colon was removed.

Elmer McCollum was blind in his left eye because of a detached retina that doctors were unable to repair.

Elmer McCollum expressed the wish "that in my old age I want to keep my mind in a state of continual adventure".

Elmer McCollum got his wish by living twenty-three years in retirement, twenty-two of them in good health.

Elmer McCollum donated his honoraria from prizes and from lecturing to a student loan fund at the University of Kansas that was eventually worth $40,000.

In 1943 Elmer McCollum gave the American Dietetic Association, known today as the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, a donation that became the foundation's scholarship fund.

Elmer McCollum criticized drugstore vitamin supplements as being no better than old-time patent medicines.

Elmer McCollum did not participate beyond giving lectures, but he selected the first director, William McElroy.

Elmer McCollum had a small laboratory at Johns Hopkins's Homewood Campus and an assistant, Mrs Agatha Ann Rider.

Elmer McCollum thought the country was losing its potassium and phosphorus, and he wanted to find a way to recycle them instead of throwing them in our sewage.

Elmer McCollum died on November 15,1967, at the age of 88.

Elmer McCollum believes that McCollum transferred from the University of Wisconsin to Johns Hopkins University under suspicion of possible academic dishonesty.