Mayer acknowledged that exercise could increase food intake, but said it wasn’t “necessarily” the case. This was the heart of Mayer’s hypothesis—a purported loophole in the relationship between appetite and physical activity. “If exercise is decreased below a certain point,” Mayer told the New York Times in 1961, “food intake no longer decreases. In other words, walking one-half hour a day may be equivalent to only four slices of bread, but if you don’t walk the half hour, you still want to eat the four slices….” Mayer based this conclusion on two of his own studies from the mid-1950s.*78 The first was with laboratory rats and purported to demonstrate that rats that are exercised for one to two hours every day will actually eat less than rats that don’t exercise at all. The second was a study of mill workers in West Bengal, India, and stands as a reminder that dreadful science can pass for seminal research in the field of obesity.

Mayer worked with the dietician and chief medical officer of the company that owned the Bengali mill and an accompanying bazaar, and it was these Indian colleagues who assessed the physical activity and diet of the resident workers. These men, as Mayer reported, ranged from “extraordinarily inert” stall holders “who sat at their shop all day long,” to those engaged in intense physical activity who “shoveled ashes and coal in tending furnaces all day long.”

The evidence reported in Mayer’s paper could have been used to demonstrate any point. The more active workers in the mill, for example, both weighed more and ate more. As for the sedentary workers, the more sedentary they were, the more they ate and the less they weighed. The twenty-two clerks who lived on the premises and sat all day long weighed ten to fifteen pounds less and were reported to have eaten four hundred calories more on average than the twenty-three clerks who had to walk three to six miles to work, or even than those five clerks who walked to work and played soccer every day.