Proteins, Pathologies and Politics presents an international and historical approach to dietary change and health, contrasting current concerns with how issues such as diabetes, cancer, vitamins, sugar and fat, and food allergies were perceived in the 19th and 20th centuries. Though what we eat and what we shouldn't eat has become a topic of increased scrutiny in the current century, the link between dietary innovation and health/disease is not a new one. From new fads in foodstuffs, through developments in manufacturing and production processes, to the inclusion of additives and evolving agricultural practices changing diet, changes often promised better health only to become associated with the opposite. With contributors including Peter Scholliers, Francesco Buscemi, Clare Gordon Bettencourt, and Kirsten Gardner, this collection comprises the best scholarship on how we have perceived diet to affect health. The chapters consider: - the politics and economics of dietary change - the historical actors involved in dietary innovation and the responses to it - the extent that our dietary health itself a cultural construct, or even a product of history This is a fascinating and varied study of how our diets have been shaped and influenced by perceptions of health and will be of great value to students of history, food history, nutrition science, politics and sociology.

List of IllustrationsIntroductionDavid Gentilcore, (University of Leicester, UK) and Matthew Smith, (University of Strathclyde, UK)Part One: Responding to Chronic Disease1. The Pre-History of the Paleo Diet: Cancer in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Agnes Arnold-Forster, (Kings College London, UK)2. Nutrition, Starvation and Diabetic Diets: A Century of Change in the United States Kirsten Gardner, (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA)3. Allergic to Innovation? Dietary Change and Debate about Food Allergy in the United StatesMatt Smith, (University of Strathclyde, UK)Part Two: Scientific Discourses4. Dietary Change and Epidemic Disease: Fame, Fashion and Expediency in the Italian Pellagra Disputes, 1852-1902David Gentilcore, (University of Leicester, UK)5. Conceptualizing the Vitamin and Pellagra as an Avitaminosis: A Case-Study Analysis of the Sedimentation Process of Medical KnowledgeLucian Scrob, (The Central European University, Hungary)6. Food and Diet as Risk: The Role of the Framingham Heart StudyMaiko Rafael Spiess, (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil)7. From John Yudkin to Jamie Oliver: A Short but Sweet History on the War Against SugarRachel Meach, (University of Strathclyde, UK)Part Three: The Politics of Diet8. The Popularization of a New Nutritional Concept: The Calorie in Belgium, 1914-1918Peter Scholliers, (Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium)9. Nutritional Reform and Public Feeding in Britain, 1917-1919Bryce Evans, Liverpool Hope University, UK10. The Sin of Eating Meat: Fascism, Nazism and the Construction of Sacred VegetarianismFrancesco Buscemi, (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, Italy)11. "Milk Is Life": Nutritional Interventions and Child Welfare: The Italian Case and Post-War International AidSilvia Inaudi, (Università degli studi di Torino, Italy)12. Like Oil and Water: Food Additives and America's Food Identity Standards in the Mid-Twentieth CenturyClare Gordon, University of California, Irvine, USA)BibliographyIndex