THE NUTRITION INVESTIGATIONS OF THE OFFICE OF EXPERI- 

 M-ENT STATIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 



By C. F. Langworthy, 

 In charge of Nutrition Investigations. 



In recent years the experimental study of various problems con- 

 nected with food and nutrition of man and domestic animals has been 

 actively followed in the United States. Some of the work has been 

 of a very practical nature and some has been highly technical. 

 Though they are not commonly considered together, the studies of the 

 food of man and animals have much in common, for of course the 

 phj^siological laws which underlie the nutrition of the animal body 

 are essentially the same for all warm-blooded animals. Then, too, 

 many experimental methods are common to both classes of inves- 

 tigation, at least as regards the principles on which they are based, 

 though it is needless to say that the details and the manner of using 

 the methods are varied. A considerable part of this inquiry into 

 the various food problems has been carried on in connection with the 

 agricultural experiment stations which have been established in the 

 United States during the last thirty years and are now in operation 

 in all the States and Territories of the Union with the exception of the 

 Philippines. In the earlier years of the experiment station movement 

 in this country investigations which had to do with food in a broad 

 sense were quite largely confined to work with domestic animals. 

 However, early in their history many of the experiment stations 

 studied the nutritive value of grains and other foods used by man as 

 well as various problems connected with the storage, handling, and 

 transportation of food products and related questions, and after a 

 time a number of them included studies of the food of man in their 

 regular work. 



Studies of the nutritive value of different foods have been conducted 

 in the United States for a great many years, but the first systematic 

 attempt to investigate such problems dates from the investigations 

 carried on by Prof. W. O. Atwater for the Smithsonian Institution and 

 for the Massachusetts bureau of labor and statistics, and the nutri- 

 tion investigations of the Office of Experiment Stations are a natural 

 outgrowth of this enterprise, as Professor Atwater, who was the first 

 director of the Office of Experiment Stations, early sought to include 

 this work with the other lines followed. 



In 1894-5 Congress provided a special appropriation which enabled 

 the Secretary of Agriculture to prosecute inquiries in this direction and 



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