Not By Bread Alone

"Stefansson was a Harvard anthropologist who spent a decade or so living with the Inuit and had a lot of adventures, some of which didn’t reflect too well on him. There’s an entire book written about an expedition where he seems to have abandoned the rest of his team when his ship got stuck in the ice. But he came back from the Arctic territories in 1920 or so and said: These people eat a diet completely devoid of fruits, vegetables, and grains and they are the most vigorous people we’ve ever seen! He describes the Inuit men, for instance, with their thick clothing, running alongside the explorers on their dogsled treks for 25 miles. So the authorities of the day responded: Well, they probably developed a genetic ability to adapt to this environment where there is no fruit, vegetable or grain, so they can survive. Stefansson said: Explorers go up and it doesn’t matter where we’re from or what our genetic background is, we have to live on that diet and we become more vigorous. In fact, he convinced the medical research community and the leading nutritionists of the era, as well as the leading anthropologists, to oversee an experiment in New York in the late 1920s where he and one of his colleagues lived on an all-meat diet. They ate nothing except meat for an entire year, and the researchers measured everything imaginable. At the end of the year, they published nearly a dozen papers on the experiment, reporting that everything was better – even things like bad breath and the fungus on their toenails. There was also a series of three articles in Harpers written by Stefansson. They describe the 1928 experiment in detail and became the book, which was published in the 1940s and describes the Inuit diet in great detail. It contradicts virtually everything we’ve come to believe about what a healthy diet is. The healthiest possible diet is one devoid of all these fruits and vegetables. You don’t need what we now consider a balanced diet, because you can get everything you need from animal products, particularly if you’re eating the right fat and you’re not eating these carbohydrates that can deplete your body of certain vitamins. In the introduction to the book, one of the leading nutrition and metabolism authorities of the era wrote that this one all-meat diet experiment alone showed that the nutrition textbooks had to be rewritten. Again, it’s an amazing read. Stefansson was a great storyteller. This is what got me into all this 10 years ago. I was researching a New York Times Magazine article which was eventually called “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” , which turned into a book advance that allowed me to spend five years writing Good Calories, Bad Calories . Only in the early 2000s did people start doing experiments and clinical trials where they compared Atkins-style diets – very low carbohydrate, high fat, moderate protein diets – to the low-fat, low-calorie diet that the American Heart Association wants us to go on. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter On the one side, you had all these people eating foods that are supposed to kill us: Fatty meat, eggs, bacon, sausage, steaks, hamburgers without the bun. On the other side, you had people eating wholegrains and green vegetables, skinless chicken breasts, and very carefully counting their calories so they never eat more than 1,500 a day. You do these experiments and you find that not only do the people on the Atkins diet – the ones who are restricting carbohydrates but otherwise eating as much as they want of fat and protein – lose more weight but their heart disease risk factors improve dramatically. So when you actually do an experiment to test which is a healthier diet, the Atkins diet that we’ve all been taught will kill us turns out to be the healthier way of eating. This one , from the New England Journal of Medicine is a particularly good. One caveat is observational studies, where you identify a large cohort of people – say 80,000 people like in the Nurse’s Health Study – and you ask them what they eat. You give them diet and food frequency questionnaires that are almost impossible to fill out and you follow them for 20 years. If you look and see who is healthier, you’ll find out that people who were mostly vegetarians tend to live longer and have less cancer and diabetes than people who get most of their fat and protein from animal products. The assumption by the researchers is that this is causal – that the only difference between mostly vegetarians and mostly meat-eaters is how many vegetables and how much meat they eat. I’ve argued that this assumption is naïve almost beyond belief. In this case, vegetarians or mostly vegetarian people are more health conscious. That’s why they’ve chosen to eat like this. They’re better educated than the mostly meat-eaters, they’re in a higher socioeconomic bracket, they have better doctors, they have better medical advice, they engage in other health conscious activities like walking, they smoke less. There’s a whole slew of things that goes with vegetarianism and leaning towards a vegetarian diet. You can’t use these observational studies to imply cause and effect. To me, it’s one of the most extreme examples of bad science in the nutrition field."