The challenge to JAMA came from a physician within the American Medical Association itself—from George Thorpe, a Kansas doctor who both treated obese patients and chaired the AMA’s Section on General Practice. At the AMA annual meeting in 1957, Thorpe charged that semi-starvation diets would inevitably fail, because they work “not by selective reduction of adipose deposits, but by wasting of all body tissues,” and “therefore any success obtained must be maintained by chronic undernourishment.” Thorpe had tried Pennington’s diet, he said, after “considering a personal problem of excess weight.” He then began prescribing the diet to his patients, who experienced “rapid loss of weight, without hunger, weakness, lethargy or constipation.” Even with small portions of salad and vegetables included, Thorpe said, weight losses of six to eight pounds a month could be obtained. “Evidence from widely different sources,” he concluded, “seems to justify the use of high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets for successful loss of excess weight.”

In response to Thorpe’s testimonial, JAMA could no longer claim outright that a high-fat, carbohydrate-restricted diet would actually increase weight, as it had asserted five years earlier, but it still insisted in a 1958 editorial that the diet would endangered health, whatever else it might accomplish.*99 Pennington’s diet failed to fulfill the criterion of being “adequate in all essential nutrients,” JAMA wrote. Thus, “the most reasonable diet to employ for weight reduction is one that maintains normal proportions of fat, proteins, and carbohydrates and simply limits the total quantity of the mixture.” As it would do for the next fifty years, JAMA disregarded firsthand testimony from clinicians and trivialized the scientific issues; it promoted diets not because they were effective, but because they were supposedly “least harmful”—invariably basing its notion of harm on ideas that had been and would be strongly challenged for decades.

All the while, the DuPont experience would be confirmed in the literature repeatedly. The first confirmation came from two dietitians, Margaret Ohlson and Charlotte Young, who published their observations in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 1952. Ohlson was chair of the food and nutrition department at Michigan State University. Young had studied with Ohlson in the 1940s and then moved to Ithaca, New York, to become a nutritionist at Cornell. Young also worked with Cornell’s Student Medical Clinic, and it was in this capacity, along with struggles to control her own weight (she was five ten and weighed 260 pounds), that she had become dissatisfied with calorie-restricted diets.