How the mid-Victorians worked, ate and died

FAB RESEARCH COMMENT:

This article provides a highly accessible and fascinating summary overview of research covered in more detail in three separate papers published last year in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine - also now available via open-access:

• An unsuitable and degraded diet? Part one: public health lessons from the mid-Victorian working class diet
• An unsuitable and degraded diet? Part two: Realities of the mid-Victorian diet
• An unsuitable and degraded diet? Part three: Victorian consumption patterns and their health benefits

The research was carried out by an expert in medical pharmacology and nutrition, Dr Paul Clayton, and an expert historian - who teamed up to conducted highly detailed analyses of an extensive and unique archive of food and diet, lifestyle and health data from the UK mid-Victorian period (1840-1870). 

This really was a unique period in the UK's history, occurring just as the 'industrial revolution' had transformed transport (e.g. growth of the railways allowed fresh produce from the countryside to reach the rapidly growing urban populations), but before this revolution had accelerated to create 'globalisation' of trade - and with that, the industrialisation of our food supply.

Their findings provide some extraordinary insights into just how dramatically the diet and lifestyle of the UK population has changed since the mid-19th century.   And these papers provide a compelling case linking this diet-and-lifestyle transformation to the similarly huge changes in health and disease patterns that have also occurred since then.

Particularly striking are the dramatic changes in 'causes of death'.  Because although the mid-Victorians actually had a similar life-expectancy to modern-day 'working class' UK populations (provided that they survived childbirth and infancy).(1)

• Over 90% of deaths then were from infectious illness and/or accidents, and less than 10% from the 'degenerative diseases' like cardiovascular disease, cancers - or dementia, which was remarkably rare.

• Nowadays, those proportions have been completely reversed.

A huge body of other evidence shows that nutrition and diet are among the most powerful influences on health and disease - and these data show that even the working class mid-Victorians consumed a 'super-Mediterranean-type' diet. 

• Their foods and diet were of course also 'organic' - as this period pre-dates the birth of the 'agro-chemical industry' and the widepread use of artificial pesticides or fertilisers. And in general, population exposure to environmental toxins was much lower than today (despite the relative lack of regulation then of e.g. food standards to prevent adulteration) - as most of this 'toxic burden' has also arisen as a direct consequence of industrialisation. 

In addition, the mid-Victorians' levels of exercise were phenomenally high by modern-day standards - as were their calorie intakes (at well over double the recommended intakes for UK men and women today). And obesity was almost non-existent (except in the very rich, who took far less exercise, and could afford highly 'refined' foods such as white flour, but they were few in number...).

Most importantly - their high daily calorie intake came from fresh, whole or minimally processed foods, rich in dietary fibre and essential nutrients - not from 'ultra-processed foods' (calorie-rich but nutrient-poor, lacking in dietary fibre, and made of refined ingredients rather than food, together with numerous artificial chemical additives), which now dominate modern, western-type diets. 

In fact, a key point the authors make is that it may not even be possible to obtain truly 'optimal' intakes of many nutrients essential to prevent degenerative disease(2) 

• without eating such large quantities of healthy, minimally processed or whole foods,
• AND taking so much exercise to compensate for the calories that even these real, highly nutrient-dense foods contain.

These data are of course purely observational, and 'correlation is not causation'.  However, the authors link these findings to the scientific evidence that can (and does) show important causal links between nutrition and degenerative disease; and they make a compelling case for public health policy to take these links into account.