Categotry Archives: Medicine

Dr. Ancel Benjamin Keys, the educator and physiologist who invented K-rations, died on Nov. 20. Cause of death was not released. He was 100.
Born in Colorado Springs, Keys was the nephew of silent film star Lon Chaney. As a young man, he worked in a lumber camp, shoveled bat guano in Arizona, mined for gold and traveled to China as a sailor on an ocean liner. Keys graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in chemistry, then earned a doctorate in zoology and oceanography from the Scripps Institute. He received a second doctorate in physiology from Kings College in Cambridge, England, and worked at the Mayo Clinic for a short time before joining the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 1936. Four years later, he founded the school’s Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. Keys remained at the university until his retirement in 1972.
At the start of America’s involvement in World War II, the U.S. Army commissioned Keys to design a lightweight, non-perishable and nutritional meal for paratroopers and soldiers heading into combat. Using items he found in a Minneapolis grocery store, Keys created a meal consisting of biscuits and/or crackers, dry sausage, hard candy and chocolate. The military added chewing gum, toilet paper and four cigarettes to the package, mass-produced the “K-rations” and gave them to thousands of GIs fighting overseas.
Keys next studied the physiology of starvation. He conducted hunger experiments on conscientious objectors, and provided the government with a record of the physiological, psychological and cognitive changes his test subjects experienced due to food deprivation.
Reading the obituary pages in the newspaper inspired Keys to investigate the causes of heart disease. Beginning in 1947, he studied 283 businessmen from Minneapolis and St. Paul — meat and potatoes country — and found that heart attacks were more likely to occur in men who smoked and had high blood pressure and elevated blood cholesterol levels. After further research, Keys discovered that saturated fat largely determined cholesterol levels. If the quantity of fat in a person’s diet was reduced, he concluded, then heart disease could be prevented.
In 1958, Keys began studying the diets of 12,763 middle-aged men living in Italy, the Greek islands, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Finland, Japan and the United States. His landmark “Seven Countries Study” showed that a diet rich in vegetables, fruit, pasta, bread and olive oil would reduce the occurrence of heart disease. The results, which were chronicled in his bestselling book, “Eat Well and Stay Well,” earned him an appearance on the cover of Time magazine in 1961.
Today, the “Mediterranean diet,” which is heavy on fruits and vegetables and light on fat and meat, has gained popularity with Americans seeking to lose weight and live longer, healthier lives.