The Eat-All-You-Want Reducing Diet

I read a lot of books about nutrition, diets and obesity. I’m always intrigued to hear of a new diet, but usually, it’s just so I can complain about how stupid it is.

I’m a big fan of Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories, and the section on “Unconventional Diets” is chock full of great stuff. These are generally *not* failed diets – they are simply diets that have been forgotten. They were tested in labs or more often, clinic settings and found to be effective.

One diet in particular has always intrigued me, and that is the diet designed by Alfred Pennington and used successfully on employees of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company in the late 40s. The diet was first used by Blake Donaldson, MD.

Over the course of four decades, as Donaldson told it, he treated seventeen thousand patients for their weight problems. Most of them lost two to three pounds a week on his diet, without experiencing hunger. Donaldson claimed that the only patients who didn’t lose weight on the diet were those who cheated, a common assumption that physicians also make about calorie-restricted diets. These patients had a “bread addiction,” Donaldson wrote in that they could no more tolerate living without their starches, flour, and sugar than could a smoker without cigarettes. As a result, he spent considerable effort trying to persuade his patients to break their habit. “Remember that grapefruit and all other raw fruit is a starch. You can’t have any,” he would tell them. “No breadstuff means any kind of bread…They must go out of your life, now and forever.” (His advice to diabetics was equally frank: “You are out of your mind when you take insulin in order to eat Danish pastry.”)¹

Donaldson’s diet did allow a “hotel portion” of raw fruit or a potato, so it was not 100% sugar- and starch-free. Donaldson never did publish, but other physicians heard about his diet through in-house conferences at New York Hospital. One of these physicians was Alfred Pennington. Back in the day, large companies had their own medical divisions to look after the employees. Presumably, this is a privacy issue now, but it did allow for a study of the diet as the company had access to the patients far more of the day than a physician ever would (short of a hospital setting).

By 1948, DuPont had noticed a lot of heart disease and obesity among its executives. At this time, there was no deep-seated paranoia about saturated fats, and the DuPont house physician (Pennington was the head of industrial medicine at DuPont), Dr. George Gehrmann, had already failed to reduce the girth of his fat employees nor the number of heart attacks they were having. He had been using a low-calorie diet and encouraging exercise. This is still very much a problem today. While the drumbeat sounds “Eat Less Exercise More,” some 85% of people who try the ELEM strategy either fail to lose more than a few pounds or gain it all back when they stop. But I digress.

Pennington had great success with the DuPont executives.

He had prescribed Donaldson’s regimen to twenty executives, and they lost between nine and fifty-four pounds, averaging nearly two pounds per week. “Notable was a lack of hunger between meals,” Pennington wrote, “increased physical energy and sense of well being.” All of this seemed paradoxical: the DuPont executives lost weight on a diet that did not restrict calories. The subjects ate a minimum of twenty-four hundred calories every day, according to Pennington: eighteen ounces of lean meat and six ounces of fat divided over three meals. They averaged over three thousand calories. Carbohydrates were restricted in their diet — no more than eighty calories at each meal. “In a few cases,” Pennington reported, “even this much carbohydrate prevented weight loss, though an ad-libitum [unrestricted] intake of protein and fat, more exclusively, was successful.”²

This diet was actually printed in the June 1950 issue of Holiday Magazine under the title I’ve used for this entry. When I first saw that printed in Taubes’ book, I hunted around on the web for the text or a scan, but I didn’t find one. When I found it mentioned in Dr. Melvin Anchell’s The Steak Lover’s Diet, I looked again, and this time I found a copy for sale on eBay for $4. I bought it.

1,2 Taubes, Gary. Good Calories, Bad Calories. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2007.