Abstract

VARGAS DOMINGUEZ, Joel. The Rise and Fall of Mexico’s National Nutritional Institute and its Social Nutrition Project from 1943 to 1956. Hist. mex. [online]. 2019, vol.69, n.2, pp.511-549.  Epub Nov 20, 2019. ISSN 2448-6531.  https://doi.org/10.24201/hm.v69i2.3973.

In 1943, the first specialized nutrition research center in Mexico was founded: The National Nutritional Institute (Instituto Nacional de Nutriología, INN), which lasted for slightly over ten years. The goal of this article is to provide a panoramic view of its creation and offer information that could explain its decline. Under the leadership of Francisco de Paula Miranda, its first director, the INN kept abreast of domestic and international scientific trends. One of these trends was the broad-based international movement known as “social nutrition,” which sought to study the “problem of nutrition” and its socioeconomic causes. In line with this current, the institute used a variety of methodologies to understand and improve the nutrition of Mexicans in order to make better their quality of life. The institute’s short lifespan (1943-1956) can be understood as part of larger processes, in particular the end of a period in which international organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation financed projects in Latin America, as well as changing trends in nutritional research and the creation of other institutions that were better adapted to the new conditions of the postwar period. This article brings together documentation from domestic and international sources, allowing us to see the complex networks of the mobilization of knowledge that were woven between different scientific and medical programs, in particular those focusing on the study of marginalized populations, a question that is relatively unexplored in the historiography.

Keywords : Nutrition; Rockefeller; Fundation National Nutritional Institute; Social Nutrition; Miranda.