PLUMBING THEORY
America’s shift from proteins to grains was sparked by Ancel Keys, a biochemist from the University of Minnesota who made his name during World War II by inventing K-rations, the ready-to-eat meal for combat troops. Later, Keys was reading his local newspaper’s obituary column when he noticed an unusual number of rich Minnesotans were dropping dead of heart disease. One thing America had after the war that other nations lacked was plenty of red meat, so Keys developed a plausible-sounding theory: If you pour bacon grease down your sink, it will thicken inside your pipes and eventually clog them. Our arteries must work the same way, Keys assumed.
“Keys hypothesized that heart disease was mostly a nutritional disorder linked directly to the amount of fat in the diet,” one journalist explained. “High-fat foods raised cholesterol levels in the blood, which, in turn, increased the risk of clogged arteries and heart disease.” That also sounded right to Senator George McGovern, who’d experimented with the low-fat Pritikin Diet. McGovern very quickly gave up on low-fat himself, but just because he didn’t want to eat that way didn’t mean other people shouldn’t. McGovern would go on to become an extraordinarily influential voice in nutrition, serving as the United Nations’ first global envoy on world hunger and teaming with Senator Bob Dole to create a worldwide school lunch program.
So largely on the whim of one powerful senator, the fat-is-fatal theory was rammed through U.S. health agencies in 1977 and propelled along by governmental “food faddists who hold the public in thrall,” as Science magazine put it. Later, journalist Gary Taubes would reveal that Ancel Keys had built his argument on his “Seven Countries Study,” ignoring data from three times as many other countries that weakened his theory. Dead people were also a problem; if Keys was right, the new U.S. dietary recommendations should have caused heart disease to plummet. Instead it’s skyrocketed: in the twenty years after the fat warnings went into effect, medical procedures for heart disease quintupled from 1.2 million to 5.4 million a year.
INSULIN IS OZ
Whether you become fatter or skinnier, stronger or weaker, more alert or lethargic is largely influenced by insulin, the hormone that acts as your body’s warehouse foreman. When sugars and carbohydrates are converted to glucose and enter your bloodstream, your pancreas deploys insulin to figure out where to store it. Glucose is great when your body needs it; it fuels brain and muscle cells, and is converted into fat for future use. It also acts as tinder so your body can burn fat as fuel.
But here’s the catch: insulin evolved to handle complex carbs created by nature, like leafy greens, not simple carbs created by us, like cereal and bread. Simple carbs are absorbed too fast; your cells get their fill and the rest is turned into fat before your insulin has a chance to dissipate. The still-active insulin in your bloodstream goes looking for more sugar, which makes you feel hungry. So you chow another donut, starting the whole process all over again. Enough years of this abuse and your cells can become insulin resistant; they’re tired of being asked to absorb all this glucose, so they just stop responding. What then happens to all that glucose? It goes straight to fat.
That’s what killed Noakes’s father and brother: their system needed fuel it wasn’t getting, while storing fat it didn’t need.
FAT AS FUEL
But there’s a way out, Noakes discovered. Once you kick the carbohydrate habit, you can convert your body back into a fat burner. “If you’re fat-adapted,” Noakes posited, “then theoretically you should be able to source all your energy from fat metabolism, especially during very prolonged exercise, when the intensity of the activity is somewhat lower, so that there should not be any need to burn carbohydrates.”
Bruce Fordyce, the legendary South African ultramarathon champ, put it to the test. Like Noakes, Fordyce had packed on the pounds since his glory days. But once he stopped eating grains and sugars and adopted a high-fat, low-carb diet, Fordyce underwent a running renaissance. At age fifty-six, he beat his best-ever Comrades time by two hours and chopped five minutes off his 5K, improving from 7:20 a mile to 5:40—a tremendous achievement for any experienced athlete, let alone one pushing sixty.
Still, Fordyce’s self-experimentation is decades away from catching up with Dr. Fred Kummerow, a University of Illinois scientist who, since the 1950s, has taken the position that hardening of the arteries isn’t caused by LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol found in eggs, red meat, and cheese. If LDL were deadly, Kummerow asks, then how come half of all heart disease patients have normal or low LDL levels? Something else must have killed them, and Kummerow believes it’s exactly the food pushed by the U.S. government—polyunsaturated vegetable oils like soybean, corn, and sunflower.
“Cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, except if it’s oxidized,” Dr. Kummerow told the New York Times. And because soybean and corn oils are inherently unstable, they’re quick to oxidize under the high heat of frying or even normal digestion. Kummerow put his own body on the firing line; he eats LDL food daily, including red meat, eggs scrambled in butter, and a glass of whole milk every day. He’s one hundred years old, takes no meds, and runs his own university lab. Yes, you read that age correctly: one hundred.
When I met up with Noakes in D.C., he’d flown all the way from Cape Town for a one-day conference on “Innovations in Diabetes.” That morning, he’d tucked away a farmhand’s breakfast of eggs, sausage, and bacon. A meal like that will leave him satisfied all day, often longer. “I just don’t get hungry anymore,” he shrugged. “Sometimes I’ll feel my energy waning and realize I haven’t eaten in forty-eight hours.”
“So basically, we’re talking about Paleo?” I ask. The Paleo Diet is based on the premise that humans are healthiest when they follow the example of our Stone Age ancestors and eat grass-fed meats, wild-caught fish, vegetables, nuts, and seeds and stay away from rice, bread, pasta, and other grain-based foods from the agricultural age.
“Basically, yes,” Noakes replies, although for the sake of precision, he’d replace “Paleo” with “Banting”: Noakes can’t be scientifically certain about what early humans ate, but he knows exactly what was on the menu of an overweight London embalmer named William Banting. Back in the 1860s, Banting was England’s undertaker to the stars and so sought after that he was given the honor of building the coffin for the Duke of Wellington, one of Britain’s most beloved heroes. Banting’s success, however, was pushing him toward his own grave; he attended so many lavish funeral dinners that by age sixty-six he was “nearly spherical.” He was only five foot five, yet weighed over two hundred pounds and was so belly heavy he had to walk downstairs backwards and couldn’t tie his own shoes. Banting’s doctors prescribed every known treatment for obesity—diets, Turkish baths, heavy exercise, spa retreats, even systematic vomiting—but every pound he took off boomeranged right back on again. Oddly, Banting made a breakthrough only when he began going deaf. He went to see a hearing specialist named William Harvey, who decided Banting’s problem wasn’t his ears, but his waistline. Poor circulation was damaging his auditory canal, so in August, Banting began following Dr. Harvey’s eating instructions: