Samantha King

And he was really interested in the potential of chemistry to build stronger, healthier society.

It's a period of rapid industrialization.

People are moving to cities.

Men especially are working in hard physical labor in factories, in mines, and so on.

And Liebig is trying to think about the role of nutrition in fueling that workforce.

He's also part of a growing number of people who have come to see meat as central to a strong Europe.

So he saw nutrition as an important political project from the start.

And one of the most important experiments was this 1847 study where he compared the muscles of foxes that were killed in the chase, so being hunted, with foxes that he had been keeping in his laboratory and had fed.

fed on flesh for 200 days.

So they'd had this, what he thought of as a good healthy diet for 200 days.

And he concluded that because the foxes that were killed in the chase had 10 times more creatine in their muscles than the foxes in the laboratory, that proteinous compounds, because creatine is a proteinous compound, must be responsible for muscle action.

Right.

But what's really crucial about that experiment is that he relegates the role of carbohydrates and fat to breathing and heating the body.

Now, all of this turned out to be incorrect, more or less.

Well, yes, and even he admitted himself a few years later that he wasn't even sure that any such thing as protein existed, that there was this one nutrient that built our tissue and propelled our movement.

It's a thick black paste.

If your listeners are familiar with Bovril, which is a popular product still in Britain made from beef extract, it's like that.

It's a pasty version of molasses, very unappealing aesthetically.

It was discovered there was no protein in it.

This idea emerged that there was this deadly protein gap between the world's rich and poor.