Living Low Carb (6 page)

Lest anyone think this was a quaint little “experiment” supervised by a couple of country quacks, let’s look at the committee assembled to supervise this dietetic experiment: from Harvard University, Dr. Lawrence Henderson, Dr. Ernest Hooton, and Dr. Percy Howe; from Cornell University Medical College, Dr. Walter Niles; from the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Clark Wissler; from Johns Hopkins University, Dr. William McCallum and Dr. Raymond Pearl; from the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology, Dr. Eugene DuBois and Dr. Graham Lusk; from the University of Chicago, Dr. Edwin O. Jordan; from the Institute of American Meat Packers, Dr. C. Robert Moulton; and a physician in private practice, Dr. Clarence W. Lieb.

Not exactly “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

This is how the experiment went: For the first 3 weeks, Stefansson and Anderson were fed the standard diet of the time: fruits, cereals, bacon and eggs, and vegetables. (Notice that there were no fast foods, no snacks, and no vending-machine fare available then, so by today’s standards, the “ordinary” diet was already light-years better than what we eat now.) During those first 3 weeks, the two guys were given preliminary checkups and were basically free to come and go as they pleased. After the first 3 weeks, they went on the all-meat diet and were more or less under house arrest. Neither of them was permitted at any time, day or night, to be out of sight of a supervising doctor or a nurse.

One interesting sidebar: Anderson was able to eat anything he liked as often as he wanted, provided that it came under the experimental definition of meat: steaks, chops, brains fried in bacon fat, boiled short ribs, chicken, fish, liver, and bacon. But because Stefansson had reported in one of his books,
My Life with the Eskimo,
that he had become very ill when he had to go two or three weeks on just
lean
meat (“caribou so skinny that there was no appreciable fat”), DuBois, who headed the experiment, suggested that for a while they try a
lean-meat-only
diet on Stefansson to contrast the results with those of Anderson, who was eating whatever mix of fat and meat he felt like. They continued to give Anderson as much fat as he liked, but Stefansson was limited to chopped fatless meat.

Stefansson wrote:

The symptoms brought on at Bellevue by an incomplete meat diet (lean without fat) were exactly the same as in the Arctic, except that they came on faster—diarrhea and a feeling of general baffling discomfort. Up north the Eskimos and I had been cured immediately when we got some fat. DuBois now cured me the same way, by giving me fat sirloin steaks, brains fried in bacon fat, and things of that sort. In two or three days I was all right, but I had lost considerable weight. If yours is a meat diet then you simply must have fat with your lean; otherwise you would sicken and die.
⁸

For the rest of the year, both men were kept on a diet of meat and fat in whatever proportion they liked, and the experiment went off without a hitch. Every few weeks, with DuBois supervising, they would run around the reservoir in Central Park, then run up to DuBois’s house, going up the stairs two or three at a time, after which they would plop down on cots and have their breathing, pulse rate, and other measurements taken. These tests showed that their stamina increased the longer they stayed on the meat diet.

In 1930, DuBois and associates published the results of the study in the
American Journal of Biological Chemistry
. The title of the paper was “Prolonged Meat Diets with Study of Kidney Functions and Ketosis.” Here’s a summary of what they wrote: Stefansson, who was about ten pounds overweight at the beginning, lost his excess weight in the first few weeks on the all-meat diet. His total caloric intake ranged from 2,000 to 3,100 calories per day. His metabolic rate rose—from 60.96 to 66.38 calories per hour during the period of the weight loss, an increase of almost 9%. His blood cholesterol at the end of the year was 51 milligrams lower than it had been at the start. He wound up choosing a ratio of somewhere around 3:1 (in grams) of lean meat to fat. He continued the diet a full year, with no apparent ill effects.

Stefansson wrote about his experiences in a fascinating and very long three-part piece called “Adventures in Diet” in
Harper’s Monthly Magazine
between November 1935 and January 1936. His conclusions were surprisingly moderate: “So you
could
live on meat if you wanted to; but there is no driving reason why you
should.
Apparently you can eat healthy on meat without vegetables, on vegetables without meat, or on a mixed diet.”

What he did not say, but undoubtedly would have had he been alive today, was this: you
cannot
eat “healthy” if most of your food comes from 7-Eleven.

The low-carbers of today would’ve loved him.

A postscript: it seems that in the twenty-or-so-year interim between his days in the Bellevue dietetic ward and his life in the 1950s as a scholarly (and relatively sedentary) academic, Stefansson suffered a mild cerebral thrombosis, put on a few pounds, and became quite a grump. According to Mrs. Stefansson, her husband had mostly recovered from the thrombosis but couldn’t dump the extra weight. Her words: “By will power and near starvation, he had now and then lost a few [pounds] but [they] always came back when his will power broke down.” Mrs. Stef also noted that he had become a real pain in the butt. As she delicately put it, “Stef had grown a bit unhappy, at times grouchy.”
⁹

Stef then asked Mrs. Stef if she wouldn’t mind if he went on the “Stone-Age Eskimo sort of all-meat diet” he had thrived on during the most active part of his Arctic career. Mrs. Stef was not exactly a stay-at-home wife. She lectured, she wrote books about the Arctic, she was the director of a course called the Arctic Seminar, and she sang in madrigal groups. She had better things to do with her time than to prepare two different menus. But she bit her tongue and said, “Of course, dear. That will be fine.”

Everyone warned me that if I went on a highprotein diet my cholesterol and triglycerides would go through the roof. Meanwhile, the exact opposite happened.

—Pamela R.

So back it was to
all meat, all fat, all the time
in the Stefansson household.

Mrs. Stef wrote:

When you eat as a primitive Eskimo does, you live on lean and fat meats. A typical Stefansson dinner is a rare or medium sirloin steak and coffee. The coffee is freshly ground. If there is enough fat on the steak we take the coffee black, otherwise heavy cream is added. Sometimes we have a bottle of wine. We have no bread, no starchy vegetables, no desserts. Rather often we eat half a grapefruit. We eat eggs for breakfast, two for Stef, one for me, with lots of butter.

Startling improvements in health came to Stef after several weeks on the new diet. He began to lose his overweight almost at once, and lost steadily, eating as much as he pleased and feeling satisfied the while. He lost seventeen pounds; then his weight remained stationary, although the amount he ate was the same. From being slightly irritable and depressed, he became once more his old ebullient, optimistic self.

An unlooked-for and remarkable change was the disappearance of his arthritis, which had troubled him for years and which he thought of as a natural result of aging. One of his knees was so stiff he walked up and down stairs a step at a time, and he always sat on the aisle in a theatre so he could extend his stiff leg comfortably. Several times a night he would be awakened by pain in his hip and shoulder when he lay too long on one side; then he had to turn over and lie on the other side. Without noticing the change at first, Stef was one day startled to find himself walking up and down stairs, using both legs equally. He stopped in the middle of our stairs; then walked down again and up again. He could not remember which knee had been stiff!

Conclusion: The Stone-Age all-meat diet is wholesome. It is an eat-all-you-want reducing diet that permits you to forget you are dieting—no hunger pains remind you. Best of all, it improves the temperament. It somehow makes one feel optimistic, mildly euphoric.
¹⁰

A post-postscript: Stefansson remained married to the former Evelyn Schwartz Baird (Mrs. Stef) for 21 years; continued his research, writing, and public speaking at Dartmouth College; and died, by all accounts happy, on August 26, 1962, at the age of 83.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch….

In 1944, cases of obesity were being treated at New York City Hospital by a cardiologist named Blake Donaldson. After a year of unsuccessful results with traditional low-calorie diets, he decided to investigate alternative methods. He took himself to the American Museum of Natural History, where, using teeth as an indicator of both body condition in general and diet specifically, he hit the mother lode when he looked at skeletons dug from Inuit burial grounds. Looking further into Inuit diets, he consulted with Vilhjalmur Stefansson and became convinced that a meat-only diet was the answer for his obese patients. Donaldson allowed his patients to eat as much as they liked, but the
minimum
was one 8-ounce porterhouse steak
3 times a day,
with a cooked weight of 6 ounces lean meat and 2 ounces fat, the same 3:1 ratio of lean to fat that had worked so well in the Stefansson–Anderson experiment (and the same one that Pennington had used with his DuPont execs).

Foreshadowing many of the low-carb diets of the 1990s, Donaldson kept his patients on a strict version of the diet until they reached their target weight, at which point they could add back certain “prohibited” foods, unless they began to put on weight again. Donaldson treated some 15,000 patients and claimed a 70% success rate using this diet. He also claimed that the 30% who were unsuccessful failed to lose weight not because of any fault in the diet but because they couldn’t stay on it. He wrote a book in 1960 called
Strong Medicine,
¹¹
so named because Donaldson knew that his diet was not for the faint of heart—it took a lot of willpower and dedication to stick with it, and he knew that not everybody would be up to the challenge.

Then came a seminal moment in the history of low-carb theory, one that served as an acknowledged inspiration to the main guru of the low-carb movement of the late twentieth century, Robert Atkins. It happened in the 1950s and 1960s, and it happened in London.

Inspiration for Atkins

Professor Alan Kekwick was director of the Institute of Clinical Research and Experimental Medicine at London’s Middlesex Hospital, and Dr. Gaston L. S. Pawan was senior research biochemist of the hospital’s medical unit. These two researchers joined forces in the middle of the twentieth century to perform some visionary experiments.
¹²
They wanted to test the theory that different proportions of carbs, fat, and protein might have different effects on weight loss
even if the calories were kept the same.

In one study, they put obese subjects on a 1,000-calorie diet but varied the percentages of protein, carbs, and fat. Some subjects were on a diet of 90% protein, some 90% fat, and some 90% carbs. The subjects on the 90% protein diet lost 0.6 pounds per day, the ones on the 90% fat diet lost 0.9 pounds per day, and the ones on 90% carbs actually gained a bit.

In another study, subjects didn’t lose anything on a so-called “balanced” diet of 2,000 calories; but when these same subjects were put on a diet of primarily fat with very low carbohydrate, they were able to lose even when the calories went as high as 2,600 per day. The February 1957 issue of the American journal
Antibiotic Medicine and Clinical Therapy
reported: “If … calorie intake was kept constant… at 1,000 per day, the most rapid weight loss was noted with
high-fat diets
…. But when the calorie intake was raised to 2,600 daily in these patients,
weight loss would still occur provided that this intake was given mainly in the form of fat and protein.
” (Emphasis mine.)

Still, the criticism from the medical establishment was enormous—this work contradicted the mantra that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. One of the criticisms leveled at the two researchers was that the weight their patients lost was “just water weight.” So Kekwick and Pawan did water-balance studies that showed water loss to be only a small part of the total weight lost. Interestingly, as recently as 2002, a very well-designed study done at the University of Cincinnati and Children’s Hospital Medical Center
¹³
compared weight loss on a very low-carbohydrate diet to weight loss on a calorie-restricted low-fat diet, and found again that the greater weight loss experienced by the lowcarb dieters was
not
due to water loss. The exact words: “We think it is very unlikely that differences in weight between the two groups… are a result of [water loss] in the very low-carb dieters.” Yet to this day, the myth persists that the majority of weight lost on low-carbohydrate diets is mainly from water.

Eat Fat and Grow Slim and the Theory of Metabolic Disorder

The dietary establishment remained firmly convinced, as it does to this day, that the only thing that mattered when it came to weight reduction was calories; but there were pockets of dissent popping up throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. One of the leaders of this dissent was Dr. Richard Mackarness, who ran Britain’s first obesity and food allergy clinic and who in 1958 wrote
Eat Fat and Grow Slim
(which was revised and expanded in 1975).
¹⁴
He argued that it was
carbohydrates,
not calories, that were the culprit in weight gain. The following lines, from the foreword to the book, give the reader some idea of what’s coming. They were written by Sir Heneage Ogilvie—a consultant surgeon at Guy’s Hospital in London, the editor of
The Practitioner,
and a former vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons, England.