Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine

by Robert H. Lustig

Graves was a home economist who was trained and certified as a hospital dietitian. She had plenty of experience dealing with hospitalized diabetic patients and knew that high-protein and high-fat diets were the only effective therapies against hyperglycemia at the time. She even sponsored a 1921 treatise in Modern Hospital called “A high-fat diet for diabetic patients.” Indeed, up to that point, a high-fat diet was the only rational treatment for diabetics; Dr. Frederick Allen, the successor to Dr. Elliott Joslin at the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard, argued in 1919 that a 70 percent fat, 8 percent carbohydrate diet was optimal for diabetics. But 1921 was a watershed year for diabetes with the discovery of insulin. And insulin meant that carbohydrate was back on the menu for diabetics, and treatment was now easier to institute than prevention. The high-fat paradigm for treatment of diabetes was destined for the trash heap (at least until ninety years later). Cooper and Kellogg won out, and the low-protein, high-carb diet became codified into dietetic lore.