Living Low Carb by Jonny Bowden Read Free Book Online

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