We might also compare this conclusion to the original predictions of Keys’s hypothesis in the mid-1950s. When Keys first suggested that eating fat caused heart disease, as we discussed, he did so partly on the basis of the experience in wartime Europe, where food shortages of a few years’ duration coincided with dramatic decreases in the incidence of heart disease. Keys had attributed those decreases to the reduced availability of meat, eggs, and dairy products. Other investigators pointed out that the war changed many other aspects of diet and lifestyle. Mortality from infectious diseases, diabetes, tuberculosis, and cancer all dropped during the war. Still, to Keys it was the fat, particularly saturated fat, that was crucial. “A major lesson gained from World War II,” he wrote in 1975, “is the proof that in a very few years the incidence of CHD [coronary heart disease] could drop to a level of the order of one-fourth the preceding rate.” If this were indeed possible, or even vaguely possible based on the collective European experience during World War II, as the evidence indeed suggested, then something considerably more profound had been happening than was reflected in only the “suggestion” of a reduction in mortality seen in the clinical trials of cholesterol-lowering diets. Other factors of diet or lifestyle that had changed during wartime must have played far more significant roles in improving the health of the populations.

Part Two

Part Two

THE CARBOHYDRATE HYPOTHESIS

The world is gradually going carbohydrate. That is because there are more people than there have ever been before (one would like to add “or ever will be again”) so there must be more food. You can get about eight times as many calories from an acre of corn as you can from the flesh of pigs fed on this same corn. Because of population pressure, certain sections of the world are progressively using more of the vegetable and less of animal materials. This means that the carbohydrates, from sugar and cereals particularly, are increasing steadily in quantity. One does not need to view this with alarm, but it is not amiss to point out that this tendency is not the best road to health. Not that starches and sugars are harmful, but they are low in the essentials we must have for good health. If the proportion of carbohydrates is high then the amount of something else of greater importance is low. Nutrition is a six-way teeter-totter. Have you ever tried to balance such a device?

C. C. FURNAS AND S. M. FURNAS, Man, Bread & Destiny: The Story of Man and his Food, 1937

Chapter 5

Chapter Five

DISEASES OF CIVILIZATION