The first clinical dietary trial
In 1928, Stefansson and Anderson entered Bellevue Hospital, New York for a controlled experiment into the effects of an all-meat diet on the body. The committee which was assembled to supervise the experiment was one of the best qualified in medical history, consisting as it did of the leaders of all the branches of science related to the subject. Dr. Eugene F. DuBois, Medical Director of the Russell Sage Foundation (subsequently chief physician at the New York Hospital, and Professor of Physiology at Cornell University Medical College) directed the experiment. The study was designed to find the answers to five questions about which there was some debate:
Does the withholding of vegetable foods cause scurvy?
Will an all-meat diet cause other deficiency diseases?
Will it cause mineral deficiencies, of calcium in particular?
Will it have a harmful effect on the heart, blood vessels or kidneys?
Will it promote the growth of harmful bacteria in the gut?
The results of the year-long trial were published in 1930 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and showed that the answer to all of the questions was: no. There were no deficiency problems; the two men remained perfectly healthy; their bowels remained normal, except that their stools were smaller and did not smell. The absence of starchy and sugary carbohydrates from their diet appeared to have only good effects.
Once again, Stefansson discovered that he felt better and was healthier on a diet that restricted carbohydrates. Only when fats were restricted did he suffer any problems. During this experiment his intake had varied between 2,000 and 3,100 calories per day and he derived, by choice, an average of eighty percent of his energy from animal fat and the other twenty percent from protein.
One interesting finding from a heart disease perspective was that Stefansson's blood cholesterol level fell by 1.3 mmol/l while on the all-meat diet, rising again at the end of the study when he resumed a 'normal' diet.
But the published results had little effect on the people trying to lose weight in 1930. A diet that allowed as much meat as one could eat and also allowed a large proportion of fat must contain lots of calories. To the average slimmer, lots of calories meant putting on weight.
The evidence mounts
In 1933, a clinical study carried out at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh studied the effects of low- and high-calorie diets, ranging from 800 to 2,700 kcals.
Average daily losses:
high carb/low fat diet - 49g [like a modern slimming diet]
high carb/low protein - 122g
low carb/high protein - 183g
low carbohydrate/high fat - 205g
Drs Lyon and Dunlop pointed out that:
'The most striking feature of the table is that the losses appear to be inversely proportionate to the carbohydrate content of the food. Where the carbohydrate intake is low the rate of loss in weight is greater and conversely.'
In other words, the less carbohydrate was eaten, the greater was the amount of weight lost.
