From food hygiene services to the National Food and Nutrition Center: the evolution of community nutrition in Spain (1933-1974)

The malnutrition problems that the Spanish population was undergoing at the beginning of the 20th century represented one of the main social and health challenges that the country had to face. It was in the 1930s, after the arrival of the Second Republic, when the most significant advances in community nutrition occurred. The work analyses the degree of development reached by the food hygiene services promoted by the republican authorities and what their journey was throughout the 20th century. Although in its beginnings its functions responded to a clear preventive, social and community vocation, with the arrival of the Franco dictatorship they were limited to the development of food hygiene focused on its most bromatological aspect. This circumstance conditioned the successive initiatives of institutionalization of community nutrition that took place throughout the final decades of the last century and that aimed to give continuity to food hygiene services or to organizations such as the National Institute of Food Hygiene and Nutrition. The community dimension, and population-focused actions, were absent or limited. The results obtained allow us to explain many of the deficiencies that community nutrition policies continue to show and the difficulties in addressing the epidemiological- nutritional challenges of Spanish society in the first decades of the 21st century.