Statement for hearings on "Hunger and Malnutrition in the U.S." Joshua Lederberg
Subcommittee on Poverty June 12, 1968
Senator Joseph Clark

My credentials are as Professor of Genetics at the Stanford University School
of Medicine and Director of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Laboratories for Molecular

Medicine.

Human nutrition is not my special field. I have, however, worked extensively
on the genetics and biochemistry of nutritional deficiency in microorganisms.
I assume I was invited to testify at these hearings as a response to my general
concern for the application of biochemical science towards the alleviation of
human problems, ce

Nutrition is undoubtedly the area of biochemical science which can make the
most immediate contribution to human health. As many as a billion human beings are
suffering significant impairment in the quality of their lives for want of the
intelligent application of existing knowledge of nutrition. This is a guess, for
we do not have good, detailed scientific information about the quality
of the human diet in different parts of the world or in our own country.

We know even less about individual genetic and environmental factors which
complicate the general nutritional picture. For example, we have learned only
recently that an important nutritional disease, sprue, is based on an individual
intolerance for certain wheat proteins. Even more strikingly, we have only just
discovered that most of the world's adult population is incapable of digesting milk
sugar; i.e., that Caucasians are the minority exception! If we are now at the
stage of only just learning about such individual peculiarities, how many others
remain to be discovered under our eyes?

In the long run good nutrition will have to be regarded as a much more
sophisticated problem than distributing one pound per day of beefsteak to everyone
in the population. We can also design far more economic answers to the problem ,
which will be viable in the famine-prone world of the next decade.

The short~range problem to which this Committee is addressed must not be
swept aside by these considerations. Crude hunger must be met by providing food
today! But we must also be planning for the far-reaching and subtle problems of
nutrition or we will be spending our resources only to replace starvation by
malnutrition.

The most obvious humanitarian response is to suggest economic subsidies for
the purchase of "balanced diets". I do not criticize this as a short-run approach,
but it will not solve the more subtle problems. The construction of an economical
. but balanced diet is a taxing exercise in dietetics that overreaches the skills
and practices even of many sophisticated groups in our society.

I propose that the government take a more active role in promoting the specific
enrichment of staple foods and with the production of special food formulations to
help bypass the problem of individual dietetic ingenuity. The supplements I have
in mind are those which have been found to be relatively deficient in the diets of
a number of people, iron, calcium, the vitamins especially folic acid,and essential
amino acids. The latter especially have to be adjusted for regional differences,
season, and group habits of food preference. Food stamps should ultimately be
distributed as tokens for the purchase, not of conventional foods of dubious
nutritional advantage, but of scientifically constructed formulations. The
problems of consumer education and of economic distribution of these kinds of
products are considerably more formidable than the material cost or technology of
the diets. It will however be a telling irony if a consequence of such a program
is to transform our underprivileged classes into those having the most superb
nutrition. But this is certainly a technical possibility.

The main point I hope to convey to the Committee is the urgency of more
penetrating research on the diagnosis of nutritional adequacy and on technically
practical ways to meet it. I would call your special attention to the need for
nutritional improvement during pregnancy, lactation, and in early infancy. -It is
obviously difficult to conduct convincing experiments on the deleterious consequences
of nutritional deprivation on human development. However, abundant evidence from
animal experimentation and considerable clinical observation support the concept
that prenatal. and early infant malnutrition can have lifelong consequences for the
mental as well as the physical development of the offspring. The social importance,
and the call for action, that should be provoked by these observations are obvious!