FEBRUARY/MARCH 2000
By Dana Peck
Special to the Florida State Times
There it is on the menu: a delicious dish, but cooked with vegetable oil. Do you pass it up for a handful of cold celery and chopped carrots, or just order some of the tasty stuff?
Dr. Jacqueline Dupont could tell you what to do. As a scientist studying food and nutrition, Dupont determined that vegetable oil and other polyunsaturates should not be forbidden; in fact, they're a necessity in our diets, if we want good health.
For more than four decades, this FSU alumna has forged through mysteries of nutrition, and contributed to understanding diseases such as diabetes, arthritis and cystic fibrosis. She has helped develop nutritional standards for the nation, the standards that tell you how much fat and which fats are good for you.
Her work has also brought her awards, like the W. O. Atwater Memorial Lectureship, one of the highest in the field of nutrition. For those who know Dupont, her accomplishments are not a surprise. From her earliest days during the Depression on a strawberry farm in Plant City, she has been feisty: first a champion of girls' causes and then of women's, a trailblazer and, some might say, just a plain troublemaker.
"We started a women's revolution," Dupont said. The revolution was targeted toward one of the staunchest male-dominated fields in the United States: cattle raisers.
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Jaqueline Dupont
Dupont and her girlfriends in 4-H wanted to be on the cattle judging team, but, in those days, girls weren't allowed. So they started their own team, and won 8th place in the county as opposed to the boys, who came in 13th.
"Those boys to this day are still fussing about that," she said. From 4-H, Dupont came to Florida State on a home-ec scholarship. She had wanted to be an engineer, she said, but the male engineer career counselor in her high school got mad when she attended a meeting and wanted her out. "He couldn't tell dirty stories with me there," she said. "I'd like to wring his neck now."
Although she was poor - her parents had five children and a modest income - she thrived at FSU, thanks, in part, to her role model, mentor and protector, Dr. Harvye Lewis, and to Margaret Sandels, then dean of the School of Home Economics. "I did get a very good education," Dupont said. From FSU, it was off to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. There she did research, but her Southern background almost stopped her.
Her prospective boss sent word that she was reluctant to hire Dupont because "Negroes worked there." The boss didn't "want any little Southern girl messing race relations in the lab," Dupont said. Ironically, Dupont had worked for desegregation in Tallahassee with the YWCA. "I told them I would never intentionally offend somebody." She got the job.
Dupont went to Iowa State University for her master's, and began some of the first nutrition research with radioisotopes.
After receiving her masters, she headed back to Tallahassee to get a doctorate and continue work on dietary fat and lipid metabolism in the rat lab.
With her Ph.D. in hand, it was back to Washington, where she continued studies of cholesterol synthesis. Then she went to teach biochemistry to medical students at Howard University. Again, she blazed a new trail. "I made them do a nutrition study," she said. Her medical school classes were the only two in the United States with such nutrition experience. Throughout her research, Dupont was publishing.
At Colorado State University, she again was the first in her department to work with radioisotopes. Her studies led to the discovery that a drug designed to lower cholesterol, in reality, caused a brain abnormality. Her findings were submitted to the Food & Drug Administration, and the drug was not approved for use. In 1996, she returned to Florida.
These days, Dupont combines teaching a few graduate students with retirement activities that often include fishing for bream and bluefish near her home in Wacissa. Of course, she eats her low-fat catch.
But a lifetime researching the dangers of fats has not made her afraid of them. "I've gotten used to fats, and know how to balance the foods, I'm just glad I'm not a microbiologist - all those diseases."