Medicine: Crazy About Reducing

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U.S. experts on diets and reducing are in a tizzy. For years they had been preaching the gospel that the only way to reduce is to cut down the amount of fuel (expressed as the number of calories) stoked into the body. And to do this they nearly always recommend cutting down most drastically on fats, sugars and starches, allowing an almost unlimited intake of low-fat protein foods such as lean meats, cottage cheese. The current ruckus was started by what seemed like a heretical doctrine coming from, of all places, one of the nation's most tradition-encrusted seats of medical orthodoxy, Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

It all started more or less innocently when the institute's Dr. Vincent P. Dole and colleagues were trying to learn what factors in a diet determine how much fat the eater will store up, and whether there is anything peculiar about fat storage in obese people. Soon they had 32 patients in the institute's hospital, plus ten outpatients, on a low-protein diet with no restriction on the total daily calories—the test subjects could eat as much bread and butter with jam or jelly as they wanted, put sugar and cream in their coffee. Most of them lost weight handsomely while in the hospital. But after they went home and back to eating what they wanted when they wanted it, 52% regained the weight lost, 30% held steady, and 18% kept on reducing.

Corn Oil & Dextrose. Dole & Co. drew careful, if not highly significant, conclusions: "Limitation of protein appears to be a useful adjunct to the treatment of obesity, but, as with any other diet, regular medical supervision is essential." Their findings appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and caused only the faintest ripple among reducing authorities. But a free-lance writer and professional gourmet named Roy de Groot, serving as a night telephone operator at the institute, had been one of the out-clinic patients. He wrote a hopped-up account (published in Look magazine) of the diet's wonders and how it had taken 45 Ibs. off his roly-poly 281.

By unhappy coincidence, another Dole experimental diet invited the same kind of publicity. This was an unappetizing formula made of corn oil, evaporated milk and dextrose—10% protein, a whopping 48% fat and 42% carbohydrates. Vogue touted it as a "peasant diet," and last month the Ladies' Home Journal gave it the full treatment as a "fabulous formula."

Presto!—the nation's drugstores suddenly were deluged by unhappy fatties, who bought up dextrose supplies in the earnest hope that they had at last found the unfindable—a way to deflate abdominal tires without leaving themselves hungry. Dextrose, used in a few baby formulas and for intravenous feeding in hospitals, usually gathers dust on druggists' shelves. The Liggett chain (118 stores) may sell 400 Ibs. a month; after the LHJ fable, sales zoomed to 800 Ibs. a day. Other chains across the country reported the same sort of boom. And because the plain formula tastes so flat, there was a corresponding boost in sales of peppermint, vanilla and coffee and other flavoring extracts.