Ruth Huenemann, 95; Nutritionist Explored Obesity in Children, Teens

Ruth Lois Huenemann, a UC Berkeley nutrition expert whose long-term studies on children and teenagers expanded the understanding of obesity and its origins, died of natural causes Aug. 19 at her home in Oakland. She was 95.

Huenemann, who taught at UC Berkeley for 24 years and founded its public health nutrition program, conducted pioneering studies in the 1960s and 1970s that helped guide current research into childhood obesity, a disease considered epidemic.

In the Berkeley Teenage Study of 1961-65, she studied the eating habits, body composition and physical fitness of nearly 1,000 students and found that the tendency toward obesity begins well before adolescence.

That study led her in 1969 to organize another longitudinal research effort, the Berkeley Preschool Nutrition Study, which began with a group of 447 babies and tracked their development to the age of 16.

Huenemann sought “the keys to understanding when obesity starts,” said Leona R. Shapiro, a retired assistant professor of public health nutrition who helped design the teenagers study.

“In her studies, particularly the two longitudinal studies, she got detailed information about how children eat and their physical exercise, their body composition, their relationship with their parents -- all kinds of details that had not been organized in that way. She got into the details of how they lived,” Shapiro said Tuesday.

Shapiro recalled that one of the most surprising findings from the teenagers study was that adolescence was too late to study the onset of obesity: Children who tended to be overweight were already obese by 14.

That persuaded Huenemann to concentrate on much younger children. For the study that began in 1969, she focused on 6-month-olds and followed them until they were 4. A few years later, the study was resumed by Shapiro as the Berkeley Longitudinal Nutrition Study, which ran from 1975 to 1984.

Those studies found that overweight babies do not necessarily grow up to be obese adults. However, for those who were inclined to be overweight, the first signs of obesity appeared as early as age 3.

Signaling the encroachment of television and the growing dependence on cars for transportation, Huenemann found that physical inactivity in infancy and early childhood was a more critical risk factor for obesity than excessive calorie consumption.

“She really zeroed in on ... the declining physical activity of our youth,” said Patricia Crawford, a former Huenemann student who is co-director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Weight and Health. “This was in the ‘60s when so many of the lifestyle changes we talk about today were occurring. She was quite foresighted.”

The studies also provided solid evidence that obesity was related to income level. Prior to Huenemann’s research, people commonly believed that obesity was a problem of the overfed rich, but she showed the inverse to be true: Among children and teenagers, the poor were far more likely to have serious weight problems.

Researchers are still investigating the reasons for that link, particularly the extent to which factors such as the economics of diet and exercise contribute to higher rates of obesity among those in the lowest socioeconomic ranks, Crawford said.

Obesity is defined as being more than 30% above ideal body weight. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 30% of U.S. adults age 20 and older -- more than 60 million people -- are obese. Among children and teenagers between 6 and 19, 16% -- more than 9 million -- are considered overweight, a threefold increase since 1980.

Huenemann was the second of 14 children, all of whom, according to Shapiro, had tall, slender builds. Born to a farming family in Waukon, Iowa, Huenemann grew up in Wisconsin and graduated from high school in South Dakota. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse for five years before she had earned enough money to attend the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in nutrition in 1938.

After receiving a master’s in nutrition from the University of Chicago in 1941, she taught for a decade at the University of Tennessee. A scholarship enabled her to study at Harvard University, where she earned a doctorate in public health nutrition in 1954 with a dissertation on the nutritional health of Peruvian children.

She had joined UC Berkeley in 1953, and quickly began to lay the foundation for what would become a nationally recognized graduate program in public health nutrition. She also created a model program that qualifies public health nutrition students to become registered dietitians.

After retiring in 1977, she was a guest lecturer at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and Pennsylvania State University in State College, as well as at UC Berkeley.

During her long career she also traveled extensively as a consultant for the World Health Organization and the U.S. State Department’s food aid program.

She is survived by a brother, William Huenemann, of Ft. Wayne, Ind.; and many nieces and nephews.