Caroline Walker (food campaigner)

Caroline Walker (1950 – 22 September 1988) was a British nutritionist, writer and campaigner for better food, who died from cancer aged 38. After her death in 1988, the Caroline Walker Trust was established with a brief for "improving public health through good food".

Caroline Walker was born in Hampshire and educated at Cheltenham Ladies College. In 1972, she graduated with a degree in Biology from Queen Elizabeth College and then did a postgraduate degree in Human Nutrition. Her MSc thesis in 1978 was on the relationship between poverty and food, which she 'knew nothing about at the time'.

In 1980, after a time working as an editor at Elsevier Scientific Publishing in Amsterdam, Walker started work at the Dunn Clinical Nutrition Centre in Cambridge, working on nutritional problems in the community. Her work at the Dunn Center included a field study designed to see whether high blood pressure was linked with high salt consumption, for which Walker experimented on herself, adding sodium chloride and lithium to her diet. She then embarked on a critical review of the state of the scientific literature on diet and the major Western diseases in Europe, starting with heart disease, whose findings would inform her work for the remainder of her life.

From 1983 to 1986 she worked as a community nutritionist for City and Hackney Health Authority, in charge of the heart and stroke prevention programme. Meanwhile, she had embarked on a career as a polemicist and writer, publicising the effects of poor diet on health.

In 1984, Walker co-authored with Geoffrey Cannon, who would later become her husband,The Food Scandal: What's Wrong with the British Diet and How to Put it Right. The Food Scandal was a bestselling book that disputed the Department of Health's official statement (from 1981) that "Nutrition in Britain is generally good". The background to the book was the NACNE (National Advisory Committee on Nutrition Education) report on the British diet. NACNE was a committee of doctors and nutritionists commissioned by the British government to produce a report on food and health in the U.K. The report was delayed for two and a half years, thanks to lobbying from the food industry, though its existence became public knowledge in 1983. When it finally appeared, the message was that the British would be much healthier if their diet contained less fat and sugar.

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