Eat Fat and Grow Slim

Eat Fat and Grow Slim by Richard Mackarness, M.B.,B.S.

In the past I had always thought that the low carb craze just stemmed from some poor graduate student who needed to finish his dissertation or from a poorly designed dietary study that got researchers started off on the wrong track. I guessed that as time went on "Science" would come around to what tradition had been saying all along that animal fat was the basis for a healthy diet. When I read Eat Fat and Grow Slim I realized that this will not be the case.

This book was published in 1958 and 50 years later the medical establishment is still barking up the wrong tree. Now that I think about it, Weston Price's work was published in the 1930s and is still being ignored. As described in the first chapter William Harvey and William Banting who advocated a the high fat diet in the 1850s and were run out of town by the medical establishment. Although the benefits of high fat diets have long been known, mankind remains willfully ignorant.

Mackarness addresses some objections to a high fat diet in the third chapter which sound very familiar:

1. High-fat diets are nauseating and make you bilious. No one could stick to such a diet for long enough to lose weight.
2. High-fat diets cause ketosis and make you ill.
3. High-fat diets may be all right in cold weather but they are too heating in hot weather.
4. High-fat diets are unbalanced and cause deficiency diseases.
5. High-fat diets cause heart disease.

One of the most interesting points in the book came during the third section of this chapter where he describes the Eskimos and how they lived. Eskimos were not slightly fat to keep themselves warm; they were actually very thin and only their fur clothes gave them the impression of being portly. An Eskimo actually had very little need to generate body heat: their warm clothing kept them warmer than a New Yorker would be during the middle of winter and their houses varied between 60 and 90 degrees depending on how close to the ceiling you were.

The book goes on to give sample diets, recommend foods, and address further concerns that a person might have about a high fat diet. I agree with most of these points although the book does not stress the importance of =organ meats. This is most likely due to the fact that organ meats were eaten more commonly at this time and that the book seems to be based on the first hand experience of western medical doctors who had discovered their textbooks were incorrect instead of a survey of indigenous cultures.