Fine Wines and Fish Oils: The Life of Hugh Macdonald Sinclair

  • Jeannette Ewin
Oxford University Press: 2001. 240 pp. £25

The nutritionist Hugh Sinclair (1910–90) was the archetypal Oxford don: erudite, urbane but disorganized, and an accomplished and witty speaker with an astonishing repertoire of nutritional anecdotes. This biography, however, which borders on being a hagiography, focuses on Sinclair's work, particularly his Oxford Nutrition Survey, his role in stimulating research on essential fatty acids and his unsuccessful struggle to establish a department of nutrition at Oxford University.

Sinclair's father was an elderly army colonel, who died when Sinclair was at boarding-school, and his mother, a member of the wealthy Scottish aristocracy, lived with him until her death in 1969. Sinclair was proud of his ancestral heritage and was an inveterate snob. Educated at Winchester and Oxford, he cultivated a taste for entertaining and fine wines while at Magdalen College. Having purchased life membership of the Middlesex Cricket Club aged nineteen, and inveigled himself into membership of the Athenaeum Club, Sinclair had a sound base from which to network with the influential scientists and magnates of his day. He read widely, travelled extensively and was able to meet some of the world's great nutritional scientists. Indeed, it could be said that he spent more time travelling and attending conferences than doing research.

Sinclair was director of the Oxford Nutrition Survey, which aimed to assess the prevalence of malnutrition among the British population. As it evolved, the survey grew more complex and became embellished by numerous studies of dietary interventions, generating enormous amounts of social, clinical and biochemical data. In 1943, during a critical phase of the survey, Sinclair absented himself for three months to attend scientific meetings and visit colleagues in the United States and Canada. He failed to work out how the accumulating data could be analysed, and the survey remained unanalysed and unpublished in his lifetime.

In 1945, Sinclair was given the rank of brigadier and sent to Holland and Germany to work as part of a team assessing the nutritional status of the Dutch and German populations. For this work he received the Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm from the United States.

While touring Canada in 1943, Sinclair met Group-Captain Tisdale of the Royal Canadian Air Force, who invited him the following year on a short expedition to observe whether riboflavin deficiency was related to snow blindness among the Canadian Inuit. It is reported that he failed to keep any written record in his diaries but embellished the tale in later life to suggest that he had joined the expedition because he was interested in the fact that the Inuit diet was high in fat, rich in essential fatty acids, and yet the Inuit were free from heart disease. During this period of his life, Sinclair's work was concerned with thiamine and diseases of the nervous system, and there was no evidence of his having any interest in cardiovascular disease and dietary fat. His epic letter to the Lancet in 1956, in which he suggested that cardiovascular disease was caused by a deficiency of essential fatty acids, was an important stimulus to future research.

Credit: DAVID NEWTON

But Sinclair was blinkered by the deficiency paradigm. And the book perpetuates the myth that he was responsible for drawing attention to the cardioprotective properties of omega-3 fatty acids. What he failed to note was that the balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids was important to health. Indeed, for many years he promoted the consumption of a diet high in omega-6 fatty acids. The major impetus for cardiovascular research on the omega-3 fatty acids arose from the work of Salvador Moncada and John Vane on prostacyclin, and Philip Needleman on thromboxane, published in 1976, three years before Sinclair embarked on his Eskimo diet to demonstrate the effects of omega-3 fatty acids from fish oils on haemostasis.

Sinclair's life-long ambition was to establish a department of nutrition at Oxford. He was appointed reader in human nutrition there in 1951. There is little doubt that he was an able scholar, but his ability as a research scientist is questionable because of his lack of attention to detail and failure to publish his results in peer-reviewed journals. He was a prolific letter-writer and collector of manuscripts (including a collection of erotica) and, following his death, these sold for more than £85,000 (US$124,000).

Like a few other famous nutritionists, such as Boyd Orr and Robert McCarrison, Sinclair liked to dabble in the politics of food and influence national policy. But his outpourings tended to be based on belief and theory rather than evidence and he was openly contemptuous of the work of his contemporaries, such as John Yudkin and Elsie Widdowson. But to his credit, Sinclair truly understood the complexity of the relationship between diet and health and recognized the need for a multidisciplinary approach.

As a scientist, he came to be regarded as a dilettante; his research lacked focus and was unsystematic. This, coupled with his failure to complete projects and produce peer-reviewed publications, and his sniping at influential contemporaries, eventually resulted in his ejection from Oxford's Department of Biochemistry in 1956 by Sir Hans Krebs, and his readership was not renewed in 1958. For the rest of his working life, Sinclair remained in the wilderness of his self-styled National Institute of Nutrition, which was situated in the grounds of his home at Lady Place in Sutton Courtenay. On his death, he bequeathed his estate to establish a chair in nutrition at Oxford which the university declined. The offer was eventually taken up by the University of Reading, where the Hugh Sinclair Nutrition Unit thrives under Christine Williams.

This is no detective story: there are no elegantly designed experiments or startling discoveries. It is a salutary warning to nutritionists that scientific progress is made by good experimental design and meticulous attention to detail and not by travelling the world on lecture tours.