Healthy On A 'Deprivation Diet'
	It seemed evident to Stefansson, as it had to Banting, that once adjusted to a plentiful diet in which only carbohydrates were restricted, his body would manufacture all the nutrients it needed for perfect functioning. He tested his theories later in controlled experiments, but although research along these lines was certainly being conducted at numerous nutritional study centres, nobody was ready to come forward with a positive statement that it was possible to stay healthy-perhaps healthier than you had ever been -to reduce excess fat, and to remain slender, muscular, and vigorous on a diet that ignored the total number of calories you ingested and concentrated instead on the amount of carbohydrate. In 1928, Stefansson took part in a strictly controlled project at Bellevue Hospital, in which medical, nutritional, and anthropological experts from some of the most august institutions in the country hoped to learn more about what happened to the human body on an all-meat, non-vegetable, non-farinaceous diet. Research was directed by Dr. Eugene F. DuBois, medical director of the Russell Sage Foundation (subsequently chief physician at New York Hospital and Professor of Physiology at CornelI University Medical College). Once again Stefansson discovered that he could get along superbly on a combination of meats and fats, and that when fats were restricted he suffered. The absence of carbohydrate appeared to have only good effects. At the end of a year on this regimen, the research team reported that almost at once Stefansson had reduced a few pounds to his best normal weight, which he had thereafter maintained with no trouble. He showed no deficiency symptoms. His body appeared to have manufactured all its mineral and vitamin needs from the food it had been given. There was no loss of energy; in fact, as before, Stefansson functioned better than ever on this restricted diet and it seemed evident that when carbohydrate calories were not available for energy his body was perfectly capable of deriving what it needed from protein with fat. The results of the test were of course published, but they left the general public cold. People were convinced that a diet which offered you as much meat as you could eat (the research indicated that a person on this diet would be able to eat, and would have appetite for, only as much as his body required) and which included the dreaded item fat, could result only in supplying a lethal number of calories. The possibility that it was not the number but the kind, and how the body used them, that added up to excess fat, simply had no appeal. Next: Calories: The Beginning Of The End