A Trip down Memory Lane

I love to troll the free bin at the library.  Lots of good, really old stuff to be discovered, or re-discovered.  A certain person has been decluttering their library of all diet and recipe books, and several low carb favorites or classics have shown up.

A recent find is "The Steak Lovers' Diet" by Melvin Anchell, MD. 

The foreword by Dr. William Campbell Douglass is worth a read.  He is sort of an obscure alternative medicine author, and despite the foreword having been printed in 1998, it contains lots of information that has been popularized by paleo authors over just the past few years.  You know, stuff like Weston Price and how we don't need all that Vitamin C and how vegetarians are wrong and there's just too many of them, and how the American Heart Association sucks.

I checked out another of Douglass' books, "Into the Light", and it is a fascinating read, if not a bit out of date.  Some of the chapters read just like you might have found them in Jack Kruse's blog.  All that quantum stuff, and light.  Maybe that is where he got his stuff.   It is too bad that the dominante alternative medicine folks didn't feature him more, perhaps because he wasn't a vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh, the Steak book.  This diet is apparently a rehash of the Pennington diet.  You know, THAT Pennington who has a research center full of obesity researchers that we all love to make fun of.  The original Pennington diet was rather low carb compared to today's standards.  Apparently, Pennington didn't think people needed to eat lots of carbs for their brain.  His patients lost weight on the diet by starting a meal of all types of meat, cooked in all sorts of ways (except breaded and stuffed) and afterwards, they could have one serving of a "second course".

The second course could be:  white potatoes, sweet potatoes, grapes, watermelon, rice, grapefruit, banana, pear, raspberries or blueberries.

That's pretty much it.  Coffee, and a bit of lemon is OK, NO artificial sweeteners.  Notice that there is NO bread.

The original tater tots over there at DuPont lost a bunch of weight on this.  Of course, they were execs, so they were all men.  But, I am sure that "their women" as some paleo-writers like to phrase it, followed the diet, as they were frying, broiling and braising all the big game the men dragged home from their long day at the chemical plant, and probably got a bit envious of both the weight loss and the yummy food.

It is interesting to take a look at the carbs.  They are mostly foods that contain quite a bit of glucose and little fructose.  These are pretty much the foods that Dr. Rosedale says NOT to eat, presumably because of the high glucose content.  This diet would probably send the majority of the woo-fueled-jihaddists into a tailspin.

Dr. Anchell has an interesting section on the recommendations of the Drs. Wortman, and their financial involvement in a recalled weight loss drug that might have colored their approach to weight loss recommendations.  Never heard about that before.