“The only dramatic part of the study was the surprisingly undramatic nature of the findings,” wrote Du Bois, when he later summarized the results. “Both men were in good physical condition at the end of the observation,” he reported in 1930, in one of the nine articles he and his colleagues published on the study. “There was no subjective or objective evidence of any loss of physical or mental vigor.” Stefansson lost six pounds over the course of the year, and Anderson three, even though “the men led somewhat sedentary lives.” Anderson’s blood pressure dropped from 140/80 to 120/80; Stefansson’s remained low (105/70) throughout. The researchers detected no evidence of kidney damage or diminished function, and “vitamin deficiencies did not appear.” Nor did mineral deficiencies, although the diet contained only a quarter of the calcium usually found in mixed diets, and the acidic nature of a meat-rich diet was supposed to increase calcium excretion and so deplete the body of calcium. Among the minor health issues reported by Du Bois and his colleagues was the observation that Stefansson began the experiment with mild gingivitis (inflammation of the gums), but this “cleared up entirely, after the meat diet was taken.”

When Stefansson published Not by Bread Alone, a popular treatise on fat-and-protein diets, in 1946, a New York Times reviewer wrote, “Mr. Stefansson makes the mixed-diet technicians and the nuts-and-fruits addicts look terribly silly.” Du Bois, who supervised the experiments, wrote an introduction to Stefansson’s book. After Stefansson and Anderson were living exclusively on meat, he said, “a great many dire predictions and brilliant theories faded into nothingness.” A diet that should have left Stefansson and Anderson deathly ill from scurvy had left them as healthy as or healthier than the balanced diet they had been eating in the years immediately preceding the study. “Quite evidently we must revise some of our text book statements,” Du Bois concluded.

The textbook statements on vitamins would go unrevised, however, despite laboratory research that has confirmed Stefansson’s speculations. Nutritionists would establish by the late 1930s that B vitamins are depleted from the body by the consumption of carbohydrates. “There is an increased need for these vitamins when more carbohydrate in the diet is consumed,” as Theodore Van Itallie of Columbia University testified to McGovern’s Select Committee in 1973. A similar argument can now be made for vitamin C. Type 2 diabetics have roughly 30 percent lower levels of vitamin C in their circulation than do nondiabetics. Metabolic syndrome is also associated with “significantly” reduced levels of circulating vitamin C, which suggests that vitamin-C deficiency might be another disorder of civilization. One explanation for these observations—described in 1997 by the nutritionists Julie Will and Tim Byers, of the Centers for Disease Control and the University of Colorado respectively, as both “biologically plausible and empirically evident”—is that high blood sugar and/ or high levels of insulin work to increase the body’s requirements for vitamin C.