In the 1940s, the Canadian government discovered that Indigenous children in residential schools were suffering from serious malnutrition. They found low body weight, vitamin deficiencies, anemia, inflamed gums, decaying teeth and other signs of poor nutrition.
Instead of feeding these children proper nutrition, Canadian officials and researchers such as Dr. Lionel Pett, a chief architect of Canada’s Food Guide, saw an opportunity to study them. Beginning in 1947, they turned six residential schools into sites for a nutritional study that continued for several years.
In one experiment at the Port Alberni residential school, children’s milk rations were reduced to 8 ounces per day, instead of the recommended 24 ounces because government employees wanted to see the effect of an improper diet on children’s health. Even after researchers found problems, the low milk ration was maintained for two years to provide a baseline.
Another intervention included testing an experimental fortified flour mixture on residential school students. There was a federal ban on fortified flour at the time, and there was debate over whether to legalize it. Pett and his colleagues introduced an experimental flour mixture which included substances like bone meal. Pett and the researchers found increased incidences of anemia among the students who were fed the experimental flour.
But perhaps the most disturbing part involved their teeth. Researchers viewed cavities and gingivitis as indicators of nutritional health. That meant dental treatment could interfere with their results. So, researchers ordered local dentists to withhold certain dental care including sodium fluoride treatment and dental prophylaxis.
So, as children developed painful cavities, gingivitis, and systemic infections, their suffering was just documented instead of being treated. In other words, researchers were studying health problems in children while restricting interventions that could change the conditions they wanted to observe.
And this was happening as international standards for medical research were changing dramatically. The Nuremberg Code was established in 1947, and it placed voluntary consent at the centre of ethical human experimentation. But these Canadian studies continued for several more years.
Pett used the opportunity of hungry kids in residential schools who had no choice in what they were going to eat and whose parents had no choice in what they were going to eat to attempt to answer a series of questions that were of interest to him professionally and scientifically.
