Biographical Memoirs: Volume 62 (1993)
Chapter: PUBLIC SERVICE DURING WORLD WAR II AND IN THE POSTWAR YEARS
RESEARCH ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Much of Maynard's research concerned effects of diet on lactation. In 1929, he and Clive McCay reported that the removal of lipids from a grain mixture fed to milking cows and the replacement of these lipids with an isocaloric amount of starch resulted in a marked loss of milk yield (1929). Those results were later confirmed by Maynard and colleagues in additional experiments involving cows and goats (1939, 1941). Later he investigated whether these findings of the effect of reducing dietary fat content on lactational yield would apply to animals that were not herbivores. For example, in 1942 he and a colleague examined the effect of reducing dietary fat on lactational performance in rats (1942). They showed that the young from mothers on a high-fat diet grew better than those on a low-fat diet.
PUBLIC SERVICE DURING WORLD WAR II AND IN THE POSTWAR YEARS
Maynard served as commissioner for nutrition of the Emergency Food Commission beginning in 1943. He also served as United States nutrition expert on Inter-Allied Food Missions to London from 1943 to 1945 and to Germany in 1945. Following the war, he was a liaison member of the New York State Food Commission until its termination in 1948.
It was during World War II that he began to shape major national food policies. This he accomplished as a member of the Food and Nutrition Board, which was particularly powerful at that time. He served as chairman of the Board from 1951 until 1955. His first concern with the Board, in which he gave outstanding leadership during the war years, was promotion of the consumption of dairy products as
