Around the time that What to Eat to be Healthy: The General Principles of Proper Nutrition in Everyday Life was published, some dietary standards had been developed in Canada by the federal and provincial governments in response to food shortages associated with the First World War, economic and political crises, and agricultural failures. The Great Depression of the 1930s produced unprecedented levels of poverty across the nation and influenced the creation of the Ontario Medical Association’s national dietary standard in 1933. Surveys showed that relief allowances for food were not enough to provide a family with adequate nutrition and that energy and vitamin intakes were too low amongst the population. These surveys also showed that most Canadians at the time didn't understand or didn't know about their own dietary needs. There was clearly a need to produce informational texts that were acessible and easy for Canadians to follow. Tisdall’s cookbook, with its focus on nutrition, would have helped to fill this gap. 

In the period prior to the publication of the book, there was a concerning number of rickets cases among younger Canadians. Tisdall had published a report titled “The Role of Nutrition in Preventive Medicine,” which discussed the 154 cases of rickets in Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children in 1925. He states that in 1935, the hospital only had four cases. During that time, surveys from the United States and Canada indicated that as many as one-third of each nation's population was lacking key nutrients in their diet. Tisdall’s understanding of the importance of adequate nutrition in the daily diet and the rickets phenomenon likely influenced his decision to contribute to What to Eat to be Healthy: The General Principles of Proper Nutrition in Everyday Life and provide Canadians with the information they needed about health, nutrition, and disease prevention.

Although not addressed directly in the cookbook, in the 1930s, Indigenous peoples in Canada were still being subjected to colonialist and assimilationist policies that stripped them of their identities, cultures, livelihoods, and health. Around the time that this cookbook was produced, the Canadian government approved a series of nutritional experiments that were performed on Indigenous children. Frederick Tisdall was part of this initiative, which involved using Indigenous children in residential schools as test subjects. The study intended to determine ways to improve Indigenous peoples' health, specifically to prevent the transmission of the deadly disease, tuberculosis, to non-Indigenous people. The experiment involved denying adequate nutrition to Indigenous children who were already malnourished in the residential school system, and testing various supplements to determine their value. The supplements included riboflavin, thiamine, and ascorbic acid. Rather than improving the students' health, the experiments led to anemia and other forms of suffering, in some cases resulting in death. This initiative reveals a significant and unethnical practice that was forced on Indigenous children without their consent.

Another unethical experiment conducted by Tisdall involved studying the effects of food on unborn babies. Pregnant women were placed on poor diets to determine the effects on their fetuses. The results showed that 14% of the babies from the poorly nourished group had more illness during their first six months of life compared to 0% from the well-nourished group. This experiment caused the death of fourteen babies from the poorly nourished group. Although What to Eat to be Healthy: The General Principles of Proper Nutrition in Everyday Life demonstrates that Canadians were paying more attention to nutrition and new research was being conducted, not all of these studies abided by ethical standards and, often, marginalized peoples were utilized as experimental subjects because their lives were considered disposable.