Biographical Memoirs: Volume 62 (1993)
Chapter: INTERPRETATION OF IMPORTANT ADVANCES AND RELEVANT ISSUES IN NUTRITION FOR POLICY MAKERS
milk rather than as butter or cream. He also initiated the Board's investigations of the uses of dairy by-products such as whey and buttermilk (1943).
After the war, he served as consultant in nutrition to various national and international agencies, including FAO, WHO, and UNICEF.
INTERPRETATION OF IMPORTANT ADVANCES AND RELEVANT ISSUES IN NUTRITION FOR POLICY MAKERS
Maynard's ability to comprehend and utilize complex data on nutrient metabolism derived from both animal and human studies, and to point out the relevance of findings to other nutritionists and to those in the agricultural sector and health care fields, indicates that he had an unusual facility for productive literature analysis outside his own field of research (1947,2). He could write equally clearly for audiences of legislators or others making decisions about foods and feeding of the U.S. population (1944,2). He could use language understood by economists to explain to them the reasons for diet-related nutritional deficiencies existing in the United States in war years, and he suggested practical means for combating such deficiencies (1947,1). He could also point out that differences in the mode of calculation of food energy requirements that existed in the 1940s between the United Kingdom and the United States imposed barriers to the international decision-making process with regard to desirable calorie levels of diets. To overcome this lack of understanding, he wrote an extensive account of the Atwater system for the calculation of the energy value of diets, which was then published as an editorial review in the Journal of Nutrition.
Maynard was ahead of his time in pressing for an international system for determining not only the food energy but also the nutrient content of diets. Indeed, as early as
