When food suddenly becomes scarce—as it does when we’re dieting—it’s not just our body that undergoes change. The deprivation messes with our heads. The physiologist Ancel Keys hit upon this in an experiment he did on starvation. He mostly gets credit—or blame, depending on one’s current dieting strategy—for his work in the 1950s in which he hypothesized that saturated fat causes heart disease and should be avoided. He also popularized the Mediterranean Diet by documenting how people who ate fresh fruits and vegetables and olive oil—which was standard fare in Mediterranean countries—had fewer
...more
