Setting the Rules

Until the 1940s, few men worried about whether certain foods would expand their waistlines or clog up their arteries, says Adrienne Bitar, a food historian and the author of Diet and the Disease of Civilisation. Dietary advice primarily focused on eating more to avoid malnutrition, rather than eating less to avoid illnesses of excess. Then, in the 1950s, Ancel Keys, a physiologist at the University of Minnesota, noticed a paradox. Rich men were well fed but suffered from a higher rate of heart disease than those with more restricted diets. Keys believed that saturated fat was to blame. He concluded that if people ate less of it, they would reduce their blood cholesterol levels and, therefore, their risk of heart disease.

In 1955, the then US president, Dwight Eisenhower, had a heart attack. “That’s when public attention cohered around the idea that heart disease was an epidemic,” says Bitar. Eisenhower adopted a low-fat diet.

Not long afterwards, the federal government started raising concerns about the levels of fat in the average American diet.

During the 1970s, a new theory emerged: that it was sugar, not rib-eye steak and brie, that was largely responsible for the Western world’s worsening health. This theory was pioneered by scientists in the south of England, including physiologist

John Yudkin, whose anti-sugar gospel Pure, White and Deadly was published in 1972, and surgeon Thomas Cleave, who wrote The Saccharine Disease. A paper in the British medical journal The Lancet asked that the cure “not be