Active Low-Carber Forums - 1928 Bellevue Study

Spent part of a vacation weak reading "Not by Bread Alone" by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (The MacMillan Company, 1946). On of the earliest media research reports on low carbing.

Not by Bread Alone might be one of the earliest low carb books; I thought it would be easier to take to the beach than Banting's 1864 "Letters on Corpulence." I could not find JeanAnthelme Brillat-Savarin 1826 Physiologie du Gout. Plus, my library had a copy of Not by Bread Alone, but I appear to be the first person since 1995 to have checked out.

The title is a play on words. People kept telling Stefansson he could not eat an all-meat diet. Stefansson left a Harvard lab research post and hung out with Eskimos on the MacKenzie River in Canada, living and eating as they did for about a decade+ beginning in 1906. From living for more than decade with Eskimos, he has a "when in Rome" attitude that gets him eating seal, caribou, etc. Not by Bread Alone is earlier than his later book: Stefansson V. The Fat of the Land MacMillan Publishing. New York. 1956

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Low-carb diets are nothing new. Throughout history writers such as Anthelme Savarin1, William Banting2, Vilhjamur Stefansson3, and Weston Price4, in one way or another, all advocated lower carbohydrate diets. In more recent times, Drs Richard Mackarness5 and John Yudkin6 both authored books espousing a lower carbohydrate intake. It is only in recent years, however, that the low-carb diet has achieved such wide and sustained popularity.

Stephen Byrnes "Low Carb Diets"

Stefansson then has discussions with the "Food Administration" about a diet of exclusively meat and then coaxes "The American Meat Institute" to fund a year-long 1928 study supervised by a panel of Drs. He gets this guy Karsten Andersen to join him in eating a diet of strictly meat and water. Later, the Dr.s relent a bit and allow black coffee (which Stefansson does not drink) and black tea. They both spend the first 90 days of the year in Bellevue Hospital in New York in the test supervised by The Russell Sage Institute of Pathology housed in Bellevue Hospital, which institute was affiliated with Cornell. Andersen spends the entire year living in the hospital (so that they can be sure that he is not sneaking OJ or Mars bars while Stefansson is off lecturing.) The year is preceded by 3 weeks in the hospital by both of them on a "mixed diet" to develop baseline readings.

Much of the book is Stefansson describing in excrutiating detail the virtue of eating meat and at that fat versus lean. He eschews "lean" and despises "vegetarian." Page after page of how the fat behind the eye of caribou is particularly well-liked and how great seal blubber is.

He traces all the mentions of "fat" in the Bible (pp. 112-14). He has an interesting chart of rising sugar consumption since colonial times (pp. 118-19).

The New York experiment is interesting in how many naysayers there were by that time:

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"In 1919, I decided that my field work in exploration was over. . . .
The conflict between my experience and orthodox dietics, which is also a conflict between the usual teaching of anthropologists and those of nutritionists, has been the subject for a number of years of papers which I published in the decade 1918-1928 through medical and other journals. . . . Year by year, an increasing number of physicians, dieticians and physiologists became interested leading to the Bellevue Hospital studies . . . .
At the start of the Bellevue test in 1928, the following were among the common dietetic beliefs: To be healthy one needed a varied diet, composed of element from both animal and vegatable sources. One tired of and eventually felt a revulsion to things which he had to eat frequently. This latter belief is supported by stories of person who through force of circumstances had been compelled, for instance, to eat during two week nothing but sardines and crackers and who, according to the stories, had sworn that so long as they lived they would never touch sardines again. Southerners commonly maintained that nobody could eat a quail a day for thirty days.
It was strongly and widely held that the less meat on ate the better it would be be for him. If one ate a good deal of it, he was supposed to develop rheumatism, hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure, with a tendency to breakdown of the kidneys--in short, premature old age. An extreme variant had it tha one would live more healthily, more happiy, and long if he became a vegetarian. . . .
A belief I found crucial in my Arctic work, making the difference between success and failure, life and death, was the view that man cannot live by meat alone. The few doctors and nutitionists who thought it could be done wer considered unorthodox, if not charlatans. The arguments ranged from metaphysics to chemistry: Man was not intended to be carniverous; this was know from examining his teeth and his stomach adn from the account of him in the Bible. As mentioned, he would get scurvy if he had not vegatables, and there are no vegetables in meat. On a diet of nothing but meat, kidneys would be ruined by overwork, there would be protein poisoning and, in general, hell to pay."

Pages 40-42.

Stefansson and Andersen were just fine after a year of eating nothing but meat, water, tea (for Stefansson) and black coffee (for Andersen). Stefansson has great fun at the expense of "experts" who are confounded. None of the perceived problems develop.

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"A conclusion of our experiment which the medical profession finds difficult to assimilate, but which at the same time is one of our clearest results, is that a normal meat diet, where one easts at each meal as much lean and fat as he likes, is not a high protein diet. . . .
Stefansson averaged about 2,650 calories a day, 2100 caloires consisting of fat and 550 protein. Andersen averaged about 2,620 calories a day, 2,110 calories consisting of fat and 510 of protein."

p. 82.

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Fat--a word is now under nearly as strong a taboo as complex feelings as "blubber"--our average citizen does not eat it if he can help it.

p.126."