Fine Wines and Fish Oils: The life of Hugh Macdonald Sinclair by
Jeannette Ewin, Oxford University Press, 拢25, ISBN 0192629271
COMMUNICATING with his mother by passing messages under doors in the house
they shared, compiling an extensive collection of erotica and stinking out
Magdalen College in 1979 when he ate nothing but seal meat and seafood for 100
days, Hugh Sinclair had brains and oddity in equal measure. Jeannette Ewin has
done him proud.
鈥淏rilliant, eccentric and sometimes foolish,鈥� Sinclair left two legacies when
he died in 1990. The first was his insistence that nutrition should not be a
narrow science, 鈥渇or it stretches from the farm, through the market, the
kitchen, the clinic and the laboratory, to the hospital ward . . . Its three
limbs are dietary, laboratory and clinical methods.鈥�
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That philosophy has inspired countless individuals. Yet some of them would
still question his second, specific teaching鈥攖hat deficiencies of
essential fatty acids result in various degenerative diseases.
Ewin set out to write about essential fatty acids鈥攂ut became so
entranced by the courteous yet restless Scot that a biography emerged instead.
Much of it covers the Oxford Nutritional Survey that Sinclair masterminded
during the Second World War to measure dietary deficiencies in Britain鈥檚
population.
Surprisingly, the results of that survey have not been fully analysed to this
day. And when Sinclair launched the International Nutrition Foundation from his
home in 1972, funding difficulties and personal peculiarities impaired its
effectiveness. Likewise, when he was Oxford鈥檚 Reader in Human Nutrition in the
1950s, his low boredom threshold limited his achievements. 鈥淚deas were picked up
and put down,鈥� says Ewin. 鈥淪ome would have led nowhere, while others, given
time, may have had profound consequences.鈥�
