†102 In 1989, William Dietz, who now serves as director of the Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity at the Centers for Disease Control, reported that Bistrian and Blackburn’s diet was “especially successful” on obese patients with a genetic disorder called Prader-Willi syndrome, “whose characteristic ravenous appetites appeared to be suppressed.”
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*103 When the authors included only randomized control trials in their calculations, they identified seven relevant studies of this severe carbohydrate restriction and seventy-five of higher-carbohydrate diets. The average weight loss was eight pounds for the carbohydrate-restricted diets and four for the higher-carbohydrate diets.
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*104 Indeed, the AMA’s 1973 critique escaped the issue of hunger by including “anorexia” as one of the “untoward side effects” of the diet. Since anorexia, in this context, is the technical term for loss of appetite, it seemed a peculiar criticism to make of a weight-loss diet.
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*105 The auxiliary “may” is critical here, because Yudkin based his conclusions on three-day dietary records, which are notoriously inaccurate. He then assumed that these three-day records could be extrapolated to the entire two weeks of the study, and from there to what would happen over months or years on the diet.
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*106 When Ted Van Itallie, who worked with Jean Mayer in the 1950s, was asked why Mayer paid so little attention to the prewar German literature on obesity, he said, “Mayer hated the Germans. He shot a few of them in World War II.”
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*107 Brobeck paired each of a dozen lesioned rats with a healthy control rat and fed the lesioned rat precisely the same amount of food that the control rat had consumed on the previous day. “In three pairs of animals,” Brobeck wrote, “the rat with lesions gained more rapidly than the control when they were fed the same amount of food.” Thus overeating could not be the cause of the excessive fattening, because these rats weren’t overeating.
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*108 In reference to the islets of Langerhans, the pancreatic cells that secrete insulin.
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*109“Diet therapy and weight loss are extremely important in reversing this process,” Rosenzweig added, “but the long-term results of these therapies have generally been disappointing, even in patients not receiving insulin.”
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*110 In which the pancreas had been removed.
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*111 Schoenheimer and Rittenberg worked in Harold Urey’s lab at Columbia. Urey had recently discovered deuterium and won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.
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†112 Wertheimer began his career at the University of Halle in Germany and was expelled from his position in the same purge that sent Schoenheimer to New York. Wertheimer immigrated to Jerusalem, where in the 1940s he became head of pathophysiology and biochemistry at the Hebrew University.
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*113 ATP gives up a phosphate molecule, becoming adenosine diphosphate, or ADP, and releases energy in the process.
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