The Fat of the Land E-Book

Vilhjalmur Stefansson

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The author details his experiment in extreme nutrition, an enlarged edition of, "Not by Bread Alone." The book extols the virtues of meat in the human diet.

Leseprobe

Contents

Comments:

By Fredrick J. Stare, M.D

By Paul Dudley White, M.D.

By the Author

Introductions:

The Physiological Side, by Eugene F. Du Bois, M.D

The Anthropological Side, by Earnest A. Hooton, Ph.D., ScD

- 1. Preliminaries and Speculation

- 2. The Home Life of Stone-Age Man

- 3. The Field Experience

- 4. The Laboratory Check

- 5. And Visit Your Dentist Twice a Year

- 6. Living on the Fat of the Land

- 7. The Blackleg in Shakespeare's Time

- 8. The Blackleg in Our Time

- 9. The Nature and Early History of Pemmican

- 10. The First Pemmican War

- 11. The Romance of Pemmican

- 12. Pemmican in Transition

- 13. The Second Pemmican War

Postscript

Bibliography

The fat of the Land

by

Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Enlarged Edition of Not by Bread Alone

With Comment by Fredrick J. Stare, M.D.,

and Paul Dudley White, M.D. New York

TOOLIVE RATHBUN WILCOX

Collaborator on fourteen previous books

and on this one

original edition by THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1960 - 1st digital edition 2016 by

David De Angelis

Comment BY FREDRICK J. STARE, M.D. Professor of Nutrition and Chairman, Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health. Boston

One day last January the telephone rang. When I answered it, Paul White said: "Stefansson is in town. Could you arrange for someone to stop by his hotel room and draw a blood specimen? You know he has been eating largely meat for most of his life, and it would be interesting to know what his cholesterol and lipoproteins run. I've already asked his permission for a blood specimen, and he has no objection.** Not only had he no objection, but he came over to oar laboratory the next day to volunteer a second specimen so that we might have duplicate samples. And that was my introduction to Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Since then I have seen him and his charming wife, Evelyn, a number of times; our correspondence has been frequent, and I am always amazed at his intellectual vigor and his breadth of knowledge. Purely by coincidence the School of Public Health was holding a seminar on the afternoon Stefansson came over to volunteer a second blood specimen. Two of its staff were reporting on some field observations of outbreaks of dysentery in the arctic, reports which, of course, we were delighted to invite Stefansson to hear. In the discussion that followed, his keen mind, sharp wit, and above all his anthropologic approach to the study of biologic problems were most evident. Those fortunate enough to have read the first edition of Not by Bread Alone are aware of its contributions to nutrition. It emphasizes the great capacity of the human organism to adapt to wide changes in food intake and to maintain good health. Above all it deals with the anthropologic approach to a biologic problem rather than with the epidemiologic, clinical, or laboratory avenues of which we hear more these days. The anthropologic approach to nutrition studies helps confirm two points—one, that good health is realizable by means of a variety of dietary patterns; two—and this point is of particular significance for nutrition education—different peoples evolve their own evaluations or standards as to proper and improper dietary patterns. Stefansson spent many years living with the Eskimos in the days before the white man's habits had pervaded these people. He was not a trader, not a missionary, but an observer who took copious notes, most of which are in his priceless collection of arctic lore in the Stefansson collection at the Dart* mouth College Library. The study of cultural factors in nutrition has emerged only recently as a distinct focus of research, marked by the formation of the Committee on Food Habits of the National Research Council in 1941. Wellin, writing in Nutrition Reviews a year ago, mentions that the concept of culture as developed in anthropology refers to those aspects of human existence transmitted through language and group life: "In any given society, culture is the design for living developed by the group, a set of 'regulations' governing the conduct of members. For the individual, culture acts as a screen of values and perceptions through which the person views food, his own body and his health, and the world." Stefansson began his anthropologic studies of the Eskimos a half-century ago, and thus was one of the first to use this discipline in human biology. It was his observation of the good health of the Eskimos, particularly their good teeth, that interested him in relation to their "lean and fat" diet of meat and that led him in later years, with his friend Andersen, to carry out under scientific scrutiny their year-long meat diet described in this book. The dominant theme of Not by Bread Alone, whether one is reading about steaks, pemmican, K rations, or biltong, is the importance of meat, lean and fat, in the diet. While Stefansson's early interests result from his personal experiences in the arctic, he has learned much from other travel, extensive reading, correspondence, and discussions. Stefansson has probably consumed more meat than any other person today. When I gave him dinner at the Harvard Club, Boston, it was roast beef with an extra serving of beef fat; at our home it was steak, with extra fat. Nothing else except Martinis and cheese. Some of the fat is consumed first. This sounds a little like the Du Pont-Holiday-Pennington diet one read so much about a few years ago. In fact, that diet was the Stefansson regimen dressed up with a little "bedside manner" which is a half-hour morning walk and "absolutely no alcohol." It is of interest to consider Stefansson's high intake of animal fat in connection with the current interest in atherosclerosis. Has it been good or bad for him? Would it be good or bad for you? Life expectancy at the time of Stefansson's birth was many yean less than it is today, but he is seven years past what it is today. But—and in my opinion an important "but"—Stef has never been obese; he has always been active physically, and he doesn't overeat. Should you start eating more meat, and particularly more animal fat? That depends on what you like to eat, how much you want to spend for food, and how carefully you watch your weight. Of course, if we all began eating more meat, there soon wouldn't be enough, particularly of the "choice" cuts. But the tenderizers do a good job of turning a chuck or top of the round into a first-class dish. I once asked Stef if the Eskimos used any tenderizing procedure for the tougher cuts of meat, and he reminded me that the answer was in his Not by Bread Alone—"even indexed under chewing!" The answer is that they don't; but neither do they do much chewing. "The uncivilized Eskimo has never had practice in herbivorous mastication and his mother has never told him to chew for the good of his health. So he gives the piece a bite or two, rolls it around his mouth once or twice, and swallows." But Stef is quite convinced that the tougher cuts of meat have the best flavor, and at home Evelyn uses tenderizers generously. One of the most interesting developments of modern nutrition has been the emergence of a number of studies emphasizing the great ability of experimental animals, including man, to adapt to wide variations in diet. We all need protein, carbohydrate, fat, various vitamins and minerals, and water. But we can get these from a great variety of foods; and Stefansson tells in this book why he thinks we do not actually need any more carbohydrate than is contained in whole meat and whole milk. Even the amounts of these nutrients may be varied appreciably, depending on the rest of the composition of the diet. It doesn't surprise me that Stef is in good health at seventyseven, several years after his life expectancy. We have studied a number of vegetarians of comparable age and of equally good health. What is important is that our diets provide us with adequate amounts of the many amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids we need, plus enough energy to balance our caloric needs so that we keep our weight in the desirable range. It is also important that we enjoy what we eat. I hope this new edition of Not by Bread Alone, under its presently controversial new name The Fat of the Land, will be as entertaining to you as it has been to me. July, 1956.

Comment BY PAUL DUDLEY WHITE, M.D.

Comment BY PAUL DUDLEY WHITE, M.D.

Is a pleasure to write a comment for this new edition of Vilhjalmur Stefansson's book, originally entitled Not by Bread Alone. In view of his interest in a high fat diet he has asked me to summarize briefly my own experiences and thoughts on the subject of life and heart disease with particular reference to the causes of high blood pressure and of coronary atherosclerosis, which is the basis, when of high degree, for the clinical condition of angina pectoris and coronary thrombosis. For a good many yean we doctors have talked about these things but only relatively recently have we done much more. Even now we are barely scratching the surface. There appear to be two sets of causative factors, which may or may not be of equal importance. These are the basic or fundamental factors which concern the host and which one can do little about and the environmental factors which can be altered and the control of which may in some way neutralize or even supersede the harmful effect of the basic factors, thus combating an attitude of hopeless fatalism. Prominent among possible basic factors are race (a doubtful factor per se); heredity, which appears to have a potent influence (no matter what the race); age, which is an insuperable factor as far as chronology is concerned, but which may prove to be amenable at least to some degree as far as physiological age is concerned; and sex, which is heavily weighted against the male in youth and middle age. Among the possible environmental factors are stress and strain, which have as yet been inadequately studied; exercise, which has been hopefully looked to by some of us as of some use in prophylaxis but the value of which is as yet unproved; toxic agents, in particular tobacco and alcohol, which are of doubtful importance; and diet, which now holds the limelight. Most workers in the field regard overweight from overeating as a harmful factor though not the chief cause behind hypertension, and a diet over-rich in total fat calories (such as the typical American diet in which 40 to 50 per cent of the calories are in fat) as a potent factor in the overwhelming epidemic of coronary heart disease which has descended upon us in the present generation as a pernicious blight. On the other hand, there is a handful of observers like Vilhjalmur Stefansson who have other ideas, in fact almost the opposite; namely, that a diet very rich in fat (up to 80 per cent of the total calories), with the rest of the calories in protein, is best for the health. This raises the question: Is it possible that the extremes of fat intake, i.e. very high (80 per cent) or low (so to 30 per cent) are safer than intermediate mixtures of fairly high fat (40 to 50 per cent)? Dr. Stefansson presents his side of the case in a new chapter in this book. More controlled scientific data are needed by all concerned, especially by the high-fat proponents. In any case to paraphrase the title of the book we may say that coronary heart disease is caused "not by fat alone," despite the probable major importance of excessive fat in the diet. I quite agree with Stefansson that a study should be made of high fat eaters (80 per cent and over) in contrast to intermediate and low fat eaters who otherwise live the same way. If, however, the diet eventually proves to be an important key to our current problems in counteracting the effect of heredity, we may rest content. July, 1956.

Comment BY THE AUTHOR

"Contoversial" was the label pinned on this first book's first edition. And why shouldn't it be? The main allegations it set out to controvert were live issues in 1946. The belief that man cannot be healthy on meat alone to a high age had by then perhaps already disappeared from the medical schools; but it was still widely held by the public, who for the most part still clung to the opinion that a high meat percentage in the diet was harmful, and that meat, or its effect, had to be "diluted" with things like carbohydrates. The last belief really meant that our forebears must have lived on a food pernicious to them through the aeons, the million or so years which preceded agriculture. For it is the consensus of the applicable sciences, and of history, that before agriculture most men lived most of the time by hunting and fishing, and by gathering things like eggs, shellfish, grubs, berries in season, and a few roots and salad-type vegetables all of which would bulk large but would not yield many calories. As to how things were before and after the coming of agriculture in the usual views of historians and scientists, which are background to our book and especially to this new edition, we quote from a recent and fascinating article by Johannes Iversen, anthropologist-botanist, in the magazine Scientific American of March, 1956, "Forest Clearance in the Stone Age." The article begins: "Perhaps the greatest single step forward in the history of mankind was the transition from hunting to agriculture. In the Mesolithic Age men lived by the spear, the bow and the fishing net. The change came independently at different times in different parts of the world." Historians and archaeologists believe generally that the shift from the hunter diet, mainly of meat, to the gradually increasing carbohydrate blend of the agriculturist came less than 15,000 years ago in China and the Near East; 5,000 years ago in Greece and Italy; 2,000 years ago in England (Julius Caesar saw agriculture being introduced there by Belgic settlers); and only 1,500 years ago in Scotland. If meat needs carbohydrate and other vegetable additives to make it wholesome, then the poor Eskimos were not eating healthfully till the last few decades. They should have been in wretched state along the north coast of Canada, particularly at Coronation Gulf, when I began to live among them in 1910 as the first white man most of them had ever seen. But, to the contrary, they seemed to me the healthiest people I had ever lived with. To spread abroad the news of how healthy and happy they and I were on meat alone was a large pan of the motive for writing this book. We do not disagree with Iversen's "perhaps the greatest single step forward in the history of mankind was the transition from hunting to agriculture," but we think an interpretation is needed. Carbohydrate, gift of the fanner to us, makes civilization possible; for now we produce many times more food on a unit of land; we have large families and leisure, we have built cities. But to make this a clear gain to man, it is necessary for him to turn a great pan of the carbohydrate into meat and milk by feeding it to stock. Otherwise he suffers in individual health; and in happiness, for the unhealthy are unhappy. And carbohydrates, as this book helps to explain, are not conducive to optimum health, at least not if taken as a high percentage of the meal. A distinguished orthodontist has said, in a passage we quote more at length hereafter, that the Eskimos "are paying for civilization with their teeth." And, this book means to show, the decay of teeth is only one of several important losses in health we suffer as a price of that food abundance which enables us to dwell in large cities and have "a high standard of living." Because of limited space we confine ourselves from here on to comment on those two of our original thirteen chapters that have proved most controversial. These chapters we attempt to bring up to date, within the space allowed. They are the fifth, "And Visit Your Dentist Twice a Year," which, although no longer so controversial, needs some amplification; and the sixth, "Living on the Fat of the Land," which needs both addition of material and consideration of strong attacks against some of its contentions. In Chapter Five we consider only two points: what the first edition says about lack of tooth decay among Eskimos as long as they were on a hunter diet, exclusively of meat; and what it says about the Icelanders having been without dental caries during that part of their history, about 600 years, when they were on a herdsman diet, that is, on meat plus milk. We take Iceland first, because the new evidence there is more readily condensed. There never were aborigines in Iceland; and the blood of the present population stems mainly from Ireland and Norway, with a total of probably less than 10 per cent from Denmark, England, Scotland, and Sweden. From the beginning of the firmly historical period, around 870, till after 1100, Iceland had matenal commerce with Europe, and imported some carbohydrates. Recent excavations of churchyards and other burial places reveal traces of a little tooth decay. But after isoo, when commerce is considered to have ceased, there was no tooth decay; nor does any appear until after 1800, the approximate renewal date, by Iceland, of modern commerce with Europe. This information came to me in a letter from Kristjan Eldjar, Director of the National Museum, Reykjavik. He says it is now (1955) considered definitely established that there was no dental caries during those 600 years, anywhere in Iceland. Today's dietary there is about that of England, or of New England, and the caries rate is similar, with the regulation dentistry, toothbrushing, hard chewing of food for the good of the teeth, and the like—all, of course, with little result. During the decay-free period, 1200 to 1800, the foods of the Icelanders were, in descending caloric importance: milk and milk products, mutton, beef, fish. There were, as we said, no imported carbohydrates; the only local non-animal food of any importance was, and then only in some places, soups made of Iceland moss. The "moss," really a lichen, had to be secured by long journeys to the mountains, which journeys, the literature shows, were summer picnics—made more for fun than for food. It is Pelion upon Ossa, and carrying coals to Newcastle, to harp on it with an anthropologist that the tooth of a meat eater never decays. But the medical and related professions have seemed little impressed. Recently, however, signs of a new trend have come from the dentists, more especially perhaps from the orthodontists. For honors are descending on heretics who claim that, for healthy teeth, diet is more important than the toothbrush. An example is the belated recognition of Dr. Leuman M. Waugh, of the School of Dental and Oral Medicine, Columbia University, whose heresies, like many of my own, were derived from seeing what the European way of life is doing to the Eskimos. During his early days. Dr. Waugh made trips for five summers to Labrador, and discovered about tooth decay what Dr. William A. Thomas of Chicago was then discovering there about rickets: caries, like rickets, was worst where European foods were most eaten. Both troubles were nearly or quite absent where European goods were unknown or negligible. Later, through a number of seasons, Dr. Waugh had similar opportunities for study in Alaska, where he found like evidence and drew like conclusions. Through the expedient of living to a high age, Dr. Waugh has managed to be honored in his time and even by his own profession; as witness the of i May 1956: "Dr. Waugh received the Albert H. Ketcham Memorial Award, highest honor of the American Association of Orthodontists, now holding their 52nd annual session at the Statler." Among the points of Dr. Waugh's address to the "more than 1200 members and guests" were these, according to the "Eskimos who'd never been exposed to civilization had the best teeth in the world. But [they] have been paying for civilization with their teeth. 'No Eskimo ever had decayed teeth until he got the white man's diet. . . . Eskimos have filthy mouths, too. Not much evidence there that keeping the mouth clean has anything to do with lack of cavities.' " But while these honors were in preparation, and the month before they were awarded, Columbia University more or less placed itself on record as still safely in the camp of the avoidcaries- by-hard-chewing school. For under date of April 1956, the had a paragraph on its "Morningside Mention" page: "Clues to dental caries were hunted recently among the Amazon Indians by Drs. Harts H. Neumann and Nicholas A. Di Salvo of the Faculty of Medicine. Their findings corroborate their theory that resistance to decay is related primarily to the pressure load placed on the teeth, i.e., that chewing with great pressure on hard foods results in 'work hardening' which causes teeth to become more resistant." In the 1946 edition our chapter "Living on the Fat of the Land" made a point of the high favor in which the Bible holds fat meats. We recited from the first book of Moses the account of the first recorded offering to Jehovah, where Cain brought vegetables and Abel "the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof"; and how "the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect." The Cain-Abel story reports the Lord of hosts direct, in the fourth chapter of Genesis. In Genesis 45:17-18 we learn by inference that both Jews and Egyptians thought well of a high fat diet: "And Pharaoh said unto Joseph . . . 'Take your father and your households, and come unto me: and I will give you the good of the land of Egypt, and ye shall eat the fat of the land.' " Our chapter tells also how we consulted eminent Bible scholars, in particular Dr. Edgar J. Goodspeed and his colleagues in Chicago, and learned their conviction that in this and similar passages the Old Testament Hebrews were thinking of fat mutton, or of mutton suet, when they spoke of "the fat of the land." ' Pursuing the topic, we quoted Isaiah 25:6: "And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things . . . of fat things full of marrow." And, not disagreeing with the scholars that usually such biblical quotations have in mind the fat meats and suets of mutton, we went on to show that beef fat was also held in high esteem. For, in the New Testament, when a father welcomed home his prodigal son, he did not butcher an ordinary calf; he slew "a fatted calf." In view of developments retailed hereafter, we have since gone a bit further into biblical matters. We were able to do it more easily because fortunately a colleague here at Dartmouth College has assumed the task of writing articles on food for dealing with foods both in their everyday and in their ritual aspects. The first problem on which we consulted Dr. James F. Ross was interpreting the currently much cited Leviticus yrjs-sj: "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying: 'Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, Ye shall eat no manner of fat, of ox, or of sheep, or of goat.' '* We questioned: Is the Bible here saying for all men and for all circumstances that no one should ever eat these fats? Or is it the meaning to prohibit these fats to certain people under certain circumstances? Dr. Ross said that he would like to study the case afresh, in view both of our interest and of his new work as a kind of food editor of a religious work for scholarly reference. But his preliminary view, based on the usual approach of Bible scholars to such problems, was: It is here being directed that when these fats have once been offered in sacrifice, or when it is intended that they be so offered, then those concerned in the offering should not themselves partake. So we asked whether Leviticus 7:23 was then saying, in effect: "Don't be an Indian giver. When you have offered up in sacrifice delicious things like the fats of the ox, sheep and goat, don't try any such double-crossing trick as eating them yourself." Yes, said Dr. Ross, that was approximately his offhand opinion, pending further study of the special case. Some weeks later we had a second talk with Dr. Ross. Though other matters had preoccupied him, he had a suggestion: to look in the and take its verdict as his own, pending his further study. And these are among the things we found, written by Nathaniel Micklem (the context shows that Micklem is speaking of sacrificial meats): "The fat is that which maintains life, and since life is God's gift and prerogative, man has no right over it" This commentary on Leviticus says also that the fat that was interlarded with the lean might be eaten (even of a sacrificial meat?). The commentator's emphasis is here on the much higher sacrificial rating of the clear suet, as distinguished from the fats that are streaked with the lean. This would be the importance of the words we now italicize from the fourth chapter of the first book of Moses: "Abel . . . brought the firstlings of his flock meaning that he brought not only fat meat but also separate fat, or suet. Our chapter about living on the fat of the land makes a good deal out of the contradiction between the fashion of 1946 to warn against high-fat diets, as overheating in hot weather, and the uniformly opposed nature of anthropological and historical evidence. For the hottest countries are, in their lore and literature, the greatest praisers of fat. The Homeric poems are from relatively warm lands of long summers, and resemble our Scripture in having not a kind word for lean meat; but Homer, like the Bible, is larded with praise of fat meats. An example is the description of a repast spread for the demigod Achilles (Book IX): "Patroklos . . . cast down a great fleshing block in the firelight, and laid thereon a sheep's back, and a fat goat's, and a great hog's chine rich with fat." In contrast with Homer's account from Greece, and the Bible's from still hotter Palestine and Egypt, are the religious and profane classics of northern European peoples, preserved to us most extensively by the Scandinavian Eddas and sagas. Our reading of these from childhood in the original fails to supply us with quotations in praise of fat to match those we find so easily in the subtropical books. As to current relish of fat, the tastes of the colder and the wanner lands vary now about as they used to do. Within the relatively small geographic compass of the United States, it is apparent when New Englanders visit the Deep South and complain that the food there is greasy; we notice it still more when North Americans visit Latin America, for the complaints are louder. When the fat-meats chapter appeared in 1946 we received mail from the tropics plaintively asking why northerners fail to grasp the principle that for the hottest weather the fattest foods are best. So, except perhaps in the Deep -South, our newspaper readers and radio listeners were no doubt generally bewildered in the summer of 1955 by the news that a professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had recommended high-fat diets for hot weather. This was Dr. Robert S. Harris, Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry, Department of Food Technology. In a letter to us he disclaims credit by saying he merely stated in his lecture "a fact, now well established, that fats in foods lower the 'specific dynamic action' during digestion and metabolism." Technical science may not owe Dr. Harris a great deal in this particular regard. But the public owes him much, and so do scientists of other disciplines. For today a specialist knows no jargon except his own, and in the gamut from astronomy to zoology there is many a professor vague on the meaning of "specific dynamic action" in relation to foods and hot weather; but everybody knows what you mean when you say, "In hot weather fat foods are good for you." According to Thorstein Veblen, a function of each special jargon among scientists is to keep other disciplines from butting into your field. If they don't quite get what it is you are writing and talking about to criticize you and compete with you effectively. Meanwhile, for a greater reason, the layman also remains in the dark. Now the public, at least, is heavily in debt to Professor Harris, and to newspapers and radio, for getting translated into the vernacular. In disclaiming credit, Harris cited Henry Clapp Sherman's eighth edition of (Macmillan Company). Then he cites Holman-Lundberg-Malkin, (Academic Press, 1954, II, i i6ff.): "Less energy is wasted as the fat content of the diet is increased. It goes on and I quote: 'Forbes et al. . . . suggest that it is not necessary to diminish the protein contents of the diet during hot weather in order to insure a low heat increment; rather one need only substitute fat for some of the carbohydrate.'" That is the significance of the Arab practice when at 110° and hotter in the shade they eat fat mutton and use for a tidbit a hunk of the specially fat tails of their sheep. They are then taking advantage of the principle that fats in foods lower specific dynamic action. Precept of Arab and principle of chemist did not mean much to most of us until someone like Dr. Harris translates for us into everyday speech, and best of all into a slogan, to give us: "Fat Foods for Hot Weather." "Fat Foods for the Fat" should be another of the slogans, and is on the way toward becoming so through a series of tests in high-fat diets performed at the instance of two of our largest corporations, the Du Pont Company of Wilmington and the Lever Brothers Company of New York. Du Pont tried their tests on vice presidents and other costly executives, desiring to prolong their lives at a health level of increased efficiency, which sounds practical; Lever Brothers may have been still more practical when they managed to enlist 122 students of the Texas State College for Women—instead of using corporation dignitaries such as my classmate, and friend since the Gay Nineties, John M. Hancock, Chairman of their Board, who was a bit overweight the last time we saw him and who may have a number of still fleshier associates among his presidents, vice presidents, and managers. We consider first the less sensational but to date more famous Du Pont executives test. Our outline is drawn from three semi-accredited articles in magazine, for many think of this as the Diet. Called on the magazine's cover "The-Eat-AH-You-Want Reducing Diet," the presentation was by Elizabeth Woody, based on information from those at Du Pont who were both on and in charge of the routine. Beside the nearly all-meat diet, the regimen was essentially a brisk half-hour walk in the morning, then ordinary duties the rest of the day, and a normal evening such as presumably is usual with corporation executives. The calories were apparently derived something over 20 per cent from lean meat, something over 50 per cent from fat, and something less than 30 per cent from other things permitted, such as a small helping of baked potato, fresh fruit, or salad-type vegetables. According to Miss Woody, the reducing of the corpulent proved painless, even pleasant; some said they were going to stick to the diet permanently. One of the many things that seem beyond doubt is that this proved the most successful magazine article had published to that date. According to one story, they reprinted and sold, at ten cents a copy, more of Miss Woody's separates than there had been copies of the original June issue. After a year the magazine ran a history, that far, of "The Eat-All-You-Want Reducing Diet," by Miss Woody. The cover of the magazine read, "All About the Diet," and it was a tale of triumph. Perhaps because lean meat had at the time a better press than fat meat, this was played up as a highprotein diet; and indeed it high protein, as we are aware from having spent a year, in 1928-1929, on its near equivalent, the Russell Sage diet, which served per day 28 to 30 ounces of lean, which, though they yielded only so per cent of our energy, still appeared to be a huge pile alongside the 8 or 9 ounces of the fat from the edges of our sirloins, which gave us 80 per cent of the calories. Actually, the main energy sources of the Du diet are similar to what ours were at Bellevue, between lean and fat, with the mentioned token servings of other things like salads, fruits, and baked potato. The greens and the fruits bulk even more than the lean, so that the fat meat in the diet would not strike the naked eye. And fond as you are sure to become of the fat edges of the sirloin of your diet, you eat them first, begin your meal with them, like a boy who begins by eating the butter off his bread, and scarce notice they are gone, unless you hanker for more. Historically speaking, the "lowdown" on the diet did not come until the magazine's issue for September 1951, in an article entitled "Footnotes on the Eat-All-You-Want Diet." Subtitled "More about the exciting 'Never feel hungry' way to reduce," the article was by Earl Parker Hanson, warmly introduced by Elizabeth Woody, Consulting Food Editor." From it appear the outlines of a story which we tell, with a few variations and additions from other sources. Analyzing the Hanson presentation, we find the sequence of names might have been, chronologically: the Eskimo Diet, the Friendly Arctic Diet, the Blake Donaldson Diet, the Alfred W. Pennington Diet, the Du Pont Diet, the Diet. Expanding a bit: While there were in pre-white times many Eskimos who used no vegetables, there were some, especially in Labrador and Alaska, who got as many calories from vegetables as the Diet does; so, even with a few things like lettuce and potato, we may well name this regimen for the Eskimos. The same diet is described in my 1921 book as used and enjoyed by whites who, like the Eskimos, found it nonfattening, and thus a good reducing menu. Then Dr. Blake Donaldson, successful New York physician, read the book, and concluded that with a few things to make the regimen more "acceptable," such as salad, fruit, and token potato, it would be a good reducing diet, and so it proved. A young disciple of Donaldson's was Alfred Pennington, and by the time the need arose for reducing Du Font's corpulent executives painlessly he was already high in the corporation's medical setup and got a chance to try out what to him was the Blake Donaldson diet—as indeed it is, for the Du Pont and menus are substantially those developed in his obesity practice by Donaldson. All this is to us a friendly story. Blake Donaldson introduced himself, somewhere back in the early twenties, as we were going up in a New York skyscraper elevator, and credited us, as he always has done since, for giving his thinking a spur through the book and thus to an extent influencing his obesity tactics and strategy. Nor has Pennington been less generous—nor has anyone else been insufficiently generous, to our view. The Du Pont Company's triumph in health-preserving and painless weight-reducing of its executives with a high-fat diet, was reached through animal fats, chiefly with fat beef sirloins and roasts; the company is not in the business of selling food and had no commercial bias in the choice of fats. But Lever Brothers are merchants in vegetable oils, and naturally it was their (presumably vegetable-derived) margarine which supplied the high-fat element of the tests they organized. So far as we know, the chief of those tests was on co-eds and the aim was broader: Du Pont wanted improved health with slimmer figures and got both; Lever Brothers wanted improved health, slimmer figures, and and they got all three. So theirs was a greater triumph than Du Font's; but it came later, to which extent only is the Lever firm behind. Physically, the success at Wilmington, Delaware, came in 1949-1950, and the large-scale publicity began with of June 1950; physically, the success at Denton, Texas, came in the period before December of 1955 and the sensational publicity was at its height in December of 1955 and January of 1956. The low-, medium-, and moderately high-fat nutrition tests of the Texas State College for Women were conducted by Dr. Pauline Beery Mack, who, before she became Dean at Denton, won her nutritionist spurs in the East, notably at Pennsylvania State University. Instead of writing a whole chapter, as we should like to do, we oversimplify in stating the Texas case: The girls in the Texas State College for Women, at Demon, mostly teen-agers, were given the chance to volunteer to live for an extended period on one of three varieties of what is essentially the Basic Seven diet, the variation, as near as could be managed, being only in the percentage of calories derived from fat. Because many of the girl candidates thought the high-fat diet would be fattening, those inclined to stoutness tried to get into the low-fat group; a number were troubled with acne or other complexion difficulties, and many of these had been told to avoid fat. Still, it appears, there were obesityprone and complexion-troubled volunteers for all groups. So far as we know, the Denton test publicity has not been specialized in by any magazine, such as their publicity seems to have been thus far chiefly straight news stories —on the radio and in the press, and on women's pages and in beauty and in food columns. Dean Mack summarized the results of the study for us in a letter of July 26, 1956: "In the tests made at the Texas State College for Women, three controlled diets, involving one of a moderately high-fat content, one of an intermediate content of fat, and one of a very low content of fat, showed that weight status was more easily retained, skin condition was superior, and fatigue resistance was better on the highest of the three fat levels—which involved between 30 and 35 per cent of the total intake as fat. When margarine was one of the components of the total fat in the controlled diet, hemoglobin concentration, dark adaptation and bone density—undoubtedly related to the Vitamin A content—were superior." Perhaps we should not write up the teen-ager triumph at Denton along the line we are using. Dean Mack sent us voluminous and strikingly scientific material. But nothing new was demonstrated in her tests, except the one thing that counts: Denton gained for moderately high-fat diets the publicity which the truth seems to require nowadays, perhaps more than in any previous age. Dean Mack got the attention of teen-age college girls who suffer acne; and the men's colleges are not going to be far behind, for boys have acne too. Boys don't worry so much over their figures in college, but they are going to when they get to be Lever or Du Pont executives, and they too will bless Drs. Pennington and Mack. While teen-agers were profiting by moderately high fat, the blessings of the same tactics were spreading farther south and to lower ages in the University of Texas, for instance to their Medical Branch at Galveston where Dr. Arild E. Hansen, Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics, was improving the standard "formulas" by increased fat content, getting thereby less crying, sounder sleep, better results generally, as he wrote to us on May so and June z, 1956. And, lest we forget, Texas was not the only progressive state in moderately high-fat diets. True, their releases were, to our knowledge, the first to point up the high fat in their successful diets; the Delaware announcements hid their fat under the name of meat, which to the general public means lean; only when you scrutinize the regimen, indeed, only when you get your information from Pennington direct or from his technical publications, do you see the importance of fat in the Du Pont regimen, where its quiet role has like significance to its publicized one in the Lever diet. As for the difference that the Levers use vegetable fat and the Du Fonts animal, no one as yet has an experimental determination of what, if anything, that difference means to the health of the diners—whether those are better off who specialize in fat on their sirloins or those who spread margarine thick on their bread or use it as shortening. True, it is claimed that margarine is cheaper. Not in our town. In Hanover, New Hampshire, we pay for our margarine; but we get our suet without charge, as a kind of premium if we buy a trimmed steak. It seemed, then, a path of garlands for the high-fat regimens. My own skies were particularly rosy, for letters were coming in from the tropics and the Deep South where they liked my books for saying fats are good in warm climates; particularly I was set up when reports told that my works, issued as "popular," were breaking into the technical circles and were being mentioned, seldom with a sneer now, at medical conventions. Particularly I was gratified that the Bellevue Hospital test of 1928 (where Andersen and I lived a year deriving four out of every five energy units from animal fat, mostly of beef and mutton) was being spoken of after three decades as a scientific milestone. High fat was riding high; and so was I with it, proudly. But pride goes before a fall; and what a fall was there, my countrymen! The first cloud in the sky was no bigger than a man's hand, in fact no larger than a brief and friendly personal note from Dr. Ancel Keyes, head of the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene of the University of Minnesota, in which note he said he was sending me a copy of his latest paper, on dietetic fats. This did not sound ominous, for I remembered vividly the support he had given me in the course of the "Second Pemmican War," which Chapter 13 of this book describes— a dispute with some Army physiologists who said the pemmican I favored as one sort of emergency ration had too much fat in it. Keyes had then written me that if pemmican contained no other ingredients than beef, fat and lean, he thought as high as 86 per cent of calories from fat would probably be all right. He and I seemed pulling together on animal fats then, about 1944. But when I read his paper in 1954, I did not feel so sure any more that in him we still had a potential booster for regimens like the Du Pont and Lever Brothers diets. Doubtless the storm had long been brewing; but I was preoccupied, and despite the Keyes paper I awoke to the changed situation only with the near tragedy of our President's illness in Denver and the Babel of discussion which followed, where now I heard from all sides that we were a nation in terrible straits, that a deadly sequence had been established. Heart disease is our chief cause of death, they said; the United States has more heart trouble than any other country; a high-fat diet is provocative of heart cases; and we are the heaviest fat eaters in the world. Luckily for my peace of mind, I was already past seventy-five, half of that span living on the fat of the land more literally than most, and still sound of heart, according to a recent physical. Except that presumably I should have been dead of heart failure long ago, I might have been frightened to death. Instead I felt rather annoyed, thinking the Russ Sage battle of 1928 might have to be fought over again, The attack on meat in the diet had been backed fifty years .ago, had even been launched, by men as prominent in their day as the viewers-with-alarm were today. In the 1920'$, and before, they had attacked meat because of the lean element it contained, animal protein; now they were attacking meat because of its fat element. Probably the great authorities of today are as wrong, I guessed, as the great were then— everybody now praises the animal protein which was so feared then; very likely within twenty years everyone will be dithyrambic once more about animal fats. That seemed to be a good bet. So, countersuggestible as I am, when the dirges began to penetrate I asked my wife if she thought it practical for me to abandon the Basic Seven diet on which, like nearly everyone, I had been living for years, and revert to the Russell Sage-Bellevue Hospital diet, of four energy units from beef or mutton fat for each unit from lean. She said this would simplify our housekeeping, and she thought save us money too; for the antifat campaign had been so pervasive in Hanover that considerate owners no longer fed scraps of fat to their dogs and cats. Instead they bought for them "rich lean meat," and the butchers are hard put to give away fat. All we'd have to do for a 5,ooo-calorie diet was to buy 1,000 calories of lean and they would joyfully present us with 4,000 in fat. From bewildered meatsellers, and in other ways, the news spread through Hanover that we were courting disaster at our house by gorging on fat meats. At least I was and, of course, my wife was increasingly tempted to follow me. I began to feel somewhat healthier than before, which doubtless would have gone unnoticed at first except for my remembering how well Karsten Andersen and I used to feel in the Bellevue Hospital days. And there were other blessings. The first notable one of these came with my morning newspaper in a dispatch from Boston which quoted Dr. Paul Dudley White, heart specialist to the President, as agreeing both with Ancel Keyes and the Bible on the dangers of high-fat diets, his scriptural agreement being with the Leviticus passage: it seemed as if the time might come when the medical men of our country would pass on to their fellow citizens the kind of message the Lord of hosts directed Moses to give the children of Israel: Ye shall not eat the fat of the ox or the sheep or the goat. The Associated Press story gave such an opening to be flippant that I could not resist writing to Dr. White, then known to me only as a distinguished Harvard medical professor and heart specialist. Because of the university association, I accredited myself to him as an alumnus of the Harvard Divinity School—to warn him and the rest of the medics that if they were to decide to endorse the Lord on this particular diet pronouncement they might find themselves in at least seeming disagreement with the Bible on one or more of its other diet passages, and that they might find a swarm of theologians buzzing around their medical heads. For the Bible often speaks well of fat meats. And then I went on to quote him some fat-appreciative passages, such as those of my "Living on the Fat of the Land" chapter of this book. There came by return mail a charming note implying, as Dr. White later made still clearer, that he was not endorsing the antifat people but merely confirming that for the time being they seemed to be having the best of the argument. He went on to say that we are only at the beginning of our knowledge of what causes various heart and circulatory troubles. Especially was he conscious of our need for more knowledge of dietetic matters. And then Dr. White laid himself open I He spoke of wanting to know more of my views and experiences, and said that he looked forward to one day reading books of mine. So of course I sent him one—this one. Perhaps two weeks passed, and I felt more strongly what I had realized the moment after I sent the book, that there should be limits to forwardness and jocularity, even among fellow alumni of the same university. But then came a fourpage, closely hand-written letter from a resort in New Hampshire. Dr. and Mrs. White were there for a rest and were reading my book to each other (perhaps reading themselves to sleep!). He was writing me on a few points which he had noted so far, and he wanted my comment. Then followed eighteen questions, a few of them with subheads and occasionally C. I spent two full days pounding out on my typewriter the best answers I could think of to his questions, six or seven pages single spaced. A third letter came: Evidently we had for discussion more points than a correspondence would handle, and we ought to get together. Would I let him know the next time I came to Boston? By return mail I said: that the hotel we usually stay at in Boston is on the same street with his office, that my wife and I were spending three days there soon because of a day's conference at the Harvard Divinity School on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that perhaps he and I could get together either the day before the conference or the one after. He replied, asking if we would dine at his home the evening before the Scrolls lecture. His wife also was interested in the Scrolls, he said, and was indeed taking a Bible course at Radcliffe with Mary Ellen Chase and (by implication) we could talk before and after dinner of ancient scrolls and of fat meats. We did more than that, as to the fats. For among the cocktail foods were strips of rare bacon enveloping bits of pickled melon rind. And at dinner we had marrowbones 1 What with our Dead Sea Scrolls discussion, the evening reminded us of what the Bible promised unto the chosen: "A feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow," the wines in our feast being replaced by cocktails. These events, which led to an admiring friendship on my part for Dr. White, led also to his writing a comment for this second edition. It led further both to friendship and to what looks like the beginning of a collaboration with Dr. White's friend and collaborator Dr. Fredrick J. Stare, Chairman, Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, who has written a more general and longer comment. July, 1956.