The Unconventional Career of Dr Muriel Bell

Whether or not you have heard of pioneering nutritionist Muriel Bell, she has had a profound effect on your health.

Appointed New Zealand's first state nutritionist in 1940, a position she held for almost a quarter-century, Muriel Bell was behind ground-breaking public health schemes such as milk in schools, iodised salt and water fluoridation. Her pioneering research on vitamins and minerals worked to prevent deficiency diseases in children, and her work on fats and cholesterol led to interventions to prevent coronary heart disease.

As a scientist, Bell was committed to evidence-based investigation, and at the base of her commitment to science lay a deep social concern, especially for women and children. In service to this cause she worked tirelessly. As a lecturer in physiology from 1923 to 1927, Muriel Bell had been one of the first women academics at Otago Medical School. In 1937 she became a foundation member of the Medical Research Council, serving for two decades while simultaneously she was the sole woman on the Board of Health. Her nutritional advice common sense to us today but revolutionary at the time was to eat more fruit and vegetables and to cut down on sugar, fat and meat.

Muriel Bell was a trailblazer by anyones definition, but her devotion to the cause came at great personal cost, as Diana Brown relates in this long-overdue biography.

Featured in the 28 August 2018 New Zealand newsletter.
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