An unsuitable and degraded diet? Part one: public health lessons from the mid-Victorian working class diet

Abstract

Principal findings The research resulting in this series of three papers (further papers to be published in succeeding issues of JRSM), drawing on a range of historical datasets viewed through the lens of current scientific understanding, indicates that cultural and other biases have distorted the historical record, leading to conclusions which test many current health policy assumptions about a steady improvement in British nutrition since the nineteenth century. As these papers show, the urban mid-Victorians, including the working classes, ate a notably good diet, including significant amounts of vegetables and fruit, which enabled a life expectancy matching that of today. We follow the example of George Rosen (a public health practitioner, and in his time editor of the American Journal of Public Health and Journal of the History of Medicine, among others), in believing that a historical dimension is essential to a sound perspective in public health today.1