Living Low Carb (5 page)

And man, is it wrong. (More coming—stay tuned.)

Later, some enterprising scientists extended the calorie theory even further. They began to measure how much heat was produced (read: how many calories were “burned”) in the course of daily activities, from resting to vigorous exercise, from sleeping to digesting food to running marathons.

It was now possible to form an equation: calories in vs. calories out. The guiding concept of weight management was officially born.

That theory is called the energy-balance theory, and it goes something like this: if you take in more calories than you burn up, you’ll gain weight. If you burn up more calories than you take in, you’ll lose weight. It doesn’t matter where those calories come from. It’s as simple as balancing a checkbook: spend more than you make, and you’re calorically in the red (and dipping into your fat stores to make up the difference); make more than you spend, and you’re in the black (and buying bigger jeans).

It was the first law of thermodynamics in action. What goes in must either come out in some other form (like heat) or stay in (in the form of fat or muscle). What it
can’t
do is simply disappear.

Yet Banting, unscientific though he was, had made an interesting observation, which was that
what
he ate made more of a difference to his fat cells than
how much
he ate. This notion was heresy to the calorie theorists who believed, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. It wasn’t until much later that the idea surfaced that calories from certain kinds of food (or combinations of food) might have a greater tendency to be stored in the body than others, or that people might vary widely in their metabolic ability to “burn” calories as opposed to “saving” them, or that the type of food eaten might actually trigger bodily responses that say “stay” or “go.”

Meanwhile, calorie-counting had taken off with a vengeance. In 1917 (the same year, coincidentally, in which the ultraconservative American Dietetic Association was founded), an L.A. physician named Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters published what had to be the first calorie-counting book ever,
Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories.
She sold 2 million books, making it the first best-selling diet book in America. And here’s the thing: by making calorie-counting equivalent to weight control, she also injected her own view of morality into the equation. People who couldn’t control their calories (and therefore their weight) just lacked self-discipline. We can thank Dr. Peters for popularizing the concept that being overweight is a sign of moral weakness. And the idea that people are fat simply because they lack self-control is still very much alive and well today—witness, for example, the recent work of Dr. Phil McGraw.
²

Calories in/calories out remains the dominant view of most mainstream weight-loss experts to this day, and it is even embraced to a degree by some of the gurus of the low-carb movement, albeit not nearly to the same extent as the mainstreamers, who have made it a virtual religion. All of the lowcarb theorists have to be seen against the backdrop of this calorie-counting orthodoxy. But throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, observations have indeed been made—and experiments performed—that have cast huge doubts on whether the calories in/calories out theory was the whole story or even the most important part of the story. Mind you, no one claims it is not
part
of the story—the argument is whether or not it is the
whole
story. Answer: It’s not.

Eat and Grow Thin: Low-Carbing Reappears on the Scene

In 1914, Vance Thompson, a nonscientist and the husband of a famous actress of the day, published a book called
Eat and Grow Thin,
³
which touted the virtues of a low-carb diet. It suggested that corpulence was caused by eating the wrong
kinds
of food, not merely the wrong amounts, and singled out “starches, sugars, and oils” as particular culprits—pretty much what you’d expect from a guy whose most famous saying was “To the scientist there is nothing so tragic on earth as the sight of a fat man eating a potato.” His list of forbidden foods included the fattiest meats (like bacon); bread, biscuits, crackers, macaroni, and anything else made from the flour of wheat, corn, rye, barley, or oats, which included all breakfast foods and cereals; rice; potatoes, corn, dried beans, and lentils; milk, cream, butter, and cheese; oils and grease of any kind; pies, cakes, puddings, pastries, custards, ice cream, sodas, candies, bonbons, and sweets; and wines, beers, ales, and spirits.

One can only imagine how many times he was asked the question we hear so often today: so,
what’s left to eat?

As it turns out, a lot. According to Thompson, the only things that had really been taken away were sugar, starch, oil, and alcohol. The rest of his book consisted of menus that included:

•  All kinds of meat (except pig in any form)

•  All kinds of game

•  All kinds of seafood—fish, lobsters, oysters, etc.

•  All kinds of fruit (except bananas and grapes)

•  All kinds of salad

•  Virtually all vegetables

The low-carb gurus of today would have loved this, except they would have added some good fat to the mix.

The book also contained this little caveat: “Never, under any circumstances—even when you have reduced to the desired weight and have, to some degree, discontinued the diet—
eat potatoes, rice, white bread, macaroni, or sweets.
”

Calories were never once mentioned in Thompson’s book, which went through 113 printings by 1931 and was still in circulation when a little problem arose at the DuPont company.

The Problem at the DuPont Company: The Work of Alfred Pennington, MD

DuPont executives were getting fat.

Really fat. No kidding.

Shortly after World War II, the medical department of E.I. DuPont, a large American chemical firm, became concerned about the growing obesity problem among the staff. The company hired Dr. Alfred Pennington and entrusted him with the job of finding out why the traditional low-calorie diets of the time were bombing when it came to losing weight. Pennington applied his considerable brain power to an analysis of the scientific literature and came to the conclusion that our old friend—the formerly fat undertaker William Banting—had been right all along: obesity was due not to overeating, but instead to the body’s inability to use carbohydrates for anything other than making fat.

Pennington put the DuPont executives on a high-fat, high-protein, lowcarbohydrate,
unrestricted-calorie
diet. He limited their carb intake to 60 grams a day, allowed them at least 24 ounces of meat and fat (more if they wanted it), and restricted them to one portion a day of any one of the following: potatoes, rice, grapefruit, grapes, melon, bananas, pears, raspberries, or blueberries.

Pennington published a number of articles in prestigious journals such as
The New England Journal of Medicine,
⁴
but he summed up his results with the fat executives best in an interview he gave to
Holiday Magazine.
I’ve added the italics for emphasis.

Of the twenty men and women taking part in the test, all lost weight on a diet in which the total calorie intake was unrestricted. The basic diet totaled about 3,000 calories per day,
but meat and fat in any desired amount were allowed those who wanted to eat still more.
The dieters reported that they felt well, enjoyed their meals and
were never hungry between meals.
Many said they felt more energetic than usual; none complained of fatigue. Those who had high blood pressure to begin with [no longer did]. The[se] twenty obese individuals lost an average of twenty-two pounds each, in an average time of three and a half months. The
range of weight loss was from nine pounds to fifty-four pounds,
and the range of time was from about one and a half months to six months.
⁵

Chalk up another one for the low-carb approach to weight loss.

Then, in 1928, something really interesting happened at the dietetic ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York City. But to understand why it happened, you have to understand the experiences of a rugged young explorer named Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

Stefansson and the Eskimos: All Meat, All Fat, All the Time

Kicked out of school at age 23 for inciting a protest within the student body, Vilhjalmur Stefansson picked up the pieces of his life and entered the world of his true love, anthropology. By 1906, at the age of 27, he had managed to get a master’s degree at Harvard, where he became an assistant professor of anthropology and got really interested in the diets of other people. Not much for city life, Stefansson dumped Harvard and decided that it would be more fun to join the Anglo-American Polar Expedition, which was kicking off that year, and travel to the Arctic.

I’ve always found it easier to
stay on a low-carb diet than on
any other kind of diet. I just
never feel as hungry so I don’t
really feel like I’m dieting.

—Doug M.

A couple of years after his first foray, he persuaded the American Museum of Natural History in New York to give him the money to do it again, and he departed on his second expedition in 1908; this time, he stayed 4 years. He discovered a previously isolated group of natives called the Copper Inuit (so named because they used copper tools), and he lived with them for his entire stay. His third and final expedition began in 1913 and lasted for 5 years.

Later, he wrote: “In 1906 I went to the Arctic with the food tastes and beliefs of the average American. By 1918, after eleven years as an Eskimo among Eskimos, I had learned things which caused me to shed most of those beliefs.”
⁶

One of the beliefs Stefansson took to the Arctic was the prevailing notion that the less meat you ate, the better off you’d be. The view then—as now—was that if you ate a lot of meat, you would develop, among other things, hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure, and, very likely, a breakdown of the kidneys.

But this is what he found: the Eskimos he lived with ate a diet that consisted almost exclusively of meat (or fish) and fat. And they were as healthy and robust as a bunch of wild horses. High blood pressure, coronary infarctions, and strokes were virtually unknown. The women rarely suffered with breast-feeding problems, complications in pregnancy, or difficult births. And prior to their contact with mainstream civilization, Eskimos seldom suffered from cancer. (Today, about a century after their contact with “civilization” and the modern diet, they routinely suffer from all of the above.)

Ever the anthropologist, Stefansson lived with an Eskimo family for much of his time in the Arctic and adopted all their eating habits. Though he had hated fish all his life, he ate it night and day. He ate it raw, baked, and boiled. He ate the heads and the tails. He even came to like the Eskimo delicacy of rotten fish, which he likened to his first taste of Camembert. It was the beginning of an aggregate of five years on a diet that consisted almost exclusively of protein, fat, and water.

According to the prevailing dietary wisdom of the times, he should’ve been dead.

He wasn’t. And, by the way, he never gained weight. He also never saw a fat Eskimo. He wrote:

Eskimos, when still on their home meats, are never corpulent—at least, I have seen none who were. Eskimos in their native garments do give the impression of fat, round faces on fat, round bodies, but the roundness of face is a racial peculiarity and the rest of the effect is produced by loose and puffy garments. See them stripped, and one does not find the abdominal protuberances and folds which are so in evidence on Coney Island beaches and so persuasive an argument against nudism.
⁷
The guy did have a sense of humor.

By the way, lest anyone think that Eskimos were somehow genetically or racially immune to getting fat, Stefansson was quick to point out how quickly they fattened up when they ate mainstream American or European diets. In other words, they stay nice and slim on a high-fat diet; but as soon as they start eating starch and sugar, guess what happens?

Stefansson was genuinely curious to see if this strange diet had produced any ill effects that he perhaps hadn’t noticed. And there were plenty of doctors who were just as curious as he. A committee was convened, and Stefansson was put through as rigorous an examination as a potential astronaut would get today. The findings were published in
The Journal of the American Medical Association
on July 3, 1926, in an article titled “The Effects of an Exclusive Long-Continued Meat Diet.” The result? The committee had failed to find even
one trace of evidence
of all the supposed harmful effects of the diet.

This brings us to the dietetic ward of Bellevue Hospital in 1928. Stefansson and Dr. Karsten Anderson, a colleague who had been on one of the expeditions with Stefansson, agreed to act as human guinea pigs in a twoperson experiment. Stefansson had not only survived but thrived on a diet that was supposed to have killed him, but this experience had never really been verified under scientific conditions. So Stefansson and Anderson agreed to live in the dietetic ward of Bellevue Hospital under the strictest of medical supervision, eating an exclusive diet of meat, for a solid year. The aim of the project was not to “prove” something, but merely to get at the facts and answer the prevailing questions of the time: Would the men get scurvy? Would they suffer from other deficiency diseases? What would be the effect on the circulatory system? On calcium levels? On the kidneys? On their weight?