My paper examines the career of William H. Adolph, a prominent biochemist who had served as president of Yenching University before joining the department of biochemistry at the Peking Union Medical College. His vast and varied work on nutrition helped lay the groundwork for biomedical nutritional research in China. Working alongside Wu Xian of Peking Union Medical College and Hou Xiangchuan of the Henry Lester Institute of Medical Research in Shanghai, Adolph established nutritional guidelines, which they set forth under the title “Minimum Nutritional Requirement for China,” that became the basis for future investigations into Chinese dietary habits, the nutritional composition of local foods, and the physiological effects associated with different nutritional states in Republican China. On the face of it, this set of nutritional guidelines seemed to differ little from its immediate and international precedent, the League of Nation’s 1936 bulletin, “Physiological Bases of Nutrition.” The Chinese nutrition committee adopted many, but certainly not all, of the nutritional parameters set forth in the League of Nation’s study. Moreover, it is clear from the language and content that the Chinese nutrition committee shared many of the theoretical suppositions advanced by the “Physiological Bases of Nutrition.” And yet, this set of nutritional guidelines represented more than just a moment of scientific consonance among different groups of scientists. What distinguishes this first and earliest instance of national standard-making about the Chinese diet is the degree to which the physicians and scientists involved insisted upon their authority to choose the precise terms in which biomedical nutritional knowledge ought to be applied to the Chinese context. The critical issue addressed by these guidelines concerned the role of protein in the diet, and in this regard, Adolph was an important figure in the characterization of China as protein deficient. His research and popular advocacy elaborated a line of scientific argument that established the primacy of protein as arbiter of national health.