THE PROBLEM
“One morning as we were talking over this question of weight control during a staff meeting, the telephone rang. I answered it and learned that a Du Pont man in a key position had died of a heart attack the night before. It wasn’t the first time we had had such news. All too often, coronary thrombosis kills off a worker in his forties or fifties or even earlier, at the height of his usefulness to his family and to society.”
“High blood pressure, as you no doubt know, is part of the picture in coronary thrombosis. As weight goes up, blood pressure tends to rise. Get the weight down and usually blood pressure drops toward the normal mark.”
“The question was, ‘How do we get the weight down?’ and the obvious answer was, ‘By diet.” Well, nobody could say we hadn’t tried. We had drawn up and distributed diet list after diet list. We had urged our overweight employees to cut down on the size of the portions they ate, to count their calories, to limit the amounts of fats and carbohydrates in their meals, to get more exercise. None of those things had worked. People meant well, but they got too hungry to hold themselves at the thousand- or fifteen-hundred-calorie level for each day. Even those who stuck with our diets for a considerable time were discouraged when they found eating that little meant they were tired and made more mistakes than usual in their work. People would start out with a spurt, stay on their diets for a while and then break over.”
“They gave dozens of different excuses-haven’t we all? Men who go on business trips would complain that they couldn’t get the special foods we recommended. Women would say they hated to be rude when they were invited out. How could they insist on having a dab of cottage cheese and some carrot strips when the hostess had planned lamb chops and baked potatoes? Executives would complain of embarrassment in eating like rabbits while they urged important customers to order filet mignon.”
“The long and the short of it was that people always have eaten because they enjoy it and the chances are they’ll keep right on in spite of everything. We knew we’d never solve the weight-control problem here until we found a way to take off pounds with food that was a pleasure to eat. What’s more, we’d have to allow people to eat enough to feel satisfied and to have enough energy to do a good day’s work.”
“Medical literature was beginning to be full of hints that such a solution might be possible. New facts about protein were coming to light. Biochemists were reporting good results with experimental animals on a high fat diet. Internists and clinicians wrote of success in controlling weight with diets in which the calorie counts ran surprisingly high. Army tests with men in the field pointed to the importance of high-calorie intake to energy, morale and effectiveness in action. Doctor Pennington will tell you all about that. Suppose I tell you about Doctor Pennington and the part he has played in our story.”
Dr. Gehrmann went on to speak of Du Pont’s decision to tackle the problem of obesity in industry much as they would a problem in any other phase of their business. The first step was to assign to the project a man whose special training was appropriate. The choice fell on Doctor Pennington. He was experienced in industrial medicine, an internist who, over a period of years, had followed closely the work of Dr. Blake Donaldson and other physicians specializing in the relation of diet to health. In what busy doctors refer to unconvincingly as their spare time, he had attended cardiac clinics where work on the prevention and cure of heart disease was in progress.
Doctor Pennington’s approach to his special assignment was as conservative as the results of the Du Pont diet program proved, ultimately, to be dramatic. He reviewed the medical literature, drew such conclusions as seemed to him justified and recommended to Doctor Gehrmann a pilot program of weight reduction to be undertaken with twenty overweight Du Pont men and women.
In midsummer of last year, a paper with the title “Obesity in Industry, the Problem and its Solution” appeared over Doctor Pennington’s name in Industrial Medicine (June, 1949, pages 259 and 260). In it, the results of the pilot program at Du Pont were revealed.
Of the twenty men and women taking part in the test, all lost weight on a dietary in which the total calorie intake was unrestricted. The basic diet totaled about 3000 calories per day, but meat and fat in any desired amount were allowed those who wanted to eat still more. The dieters reported that they felt well, enjoyed their meals and were never hungry between meals. Many said they felt more energetic than usual; none complained of fatigue. Those who had high blood pressure to begin with were happy to be told by the doctors that a drop in blood pressure paralleled their drop in weight.
The twenty “obese individuals,” as the paper unflatteringly terms them, lost an average of twenty-two pounds each, in an average time of three and a half months. The range of weight loss was from nine to fifty-four pounds and the range of time was from about one and a half to six months.
“This pilot program was no stunt,” said Doctor Gehrmann in summarizing. “It was carried out only after considerable thought and study. Its bases are deep in sound nutritional research. It was designed not to startle but to serve, and we have since broadened our Du Pont obesity-control program on the proved principles illustrated by its results.
“The diet works. It safeguards health; I’m convinced we can even say it saves lives. It boosts employee morale, it’s true, but the important thing is not that it has given these overweight men and women new figures. The diet has done just that in many instances and we’ve been pleased to see the pride these people take in being slim once more. But we’re proudest of the fact that the program may have given some of our dieters more far-reaching futures than they might otherwise have had.”
A little later, in Doctor Pennington’s office, reference files and records bearing on the high protein, high fat, low-carbohydrate diet were spread before me. There were charts and graphs and cards galore. I wanted to see them all, but first I wanted to have Doctor Pennington tell me, in simple terms, something of the nutritional discoveries that lie behind this revolutionary diet development. Next, I wanted to know how I, or anyone else who wants to drop weight safely, could follow the diet plan.
Experiments over the past twenty years, Doctor Pennington explained, have emphasized the importance of proteins in the foods we eat. Protein, of which meat is perhaps the best liked by most people, are essential in building and maintaining the tissues of the body. Within recent years, nutritional research has centered particularly about work with amino acids, the “building blocks” of which proteins are made, and it has been found that certain ones of these “building blocks” are as important in diet planning as vitamins and minerals.
“You might almost say,” Doctor Pennington added, “we are today, nutritionally speaking, emerging from the Vitamin Era into the Age of Protein.”
In addition to being essential to health, protein is known to have the quality of speeding up the metabolic processes of the body. This effect on metabolism, or the “burning up” of food by the body, makes protein especially valuable in a reducing program. Stepping up the ratio of protein in the diet is like stirring a smoldering log fire in the living-room fireplace. The flame burns brighter, heat billows into the room and soon your woodpile is half the size it was when you started. A high protein diet for reducing is nothing new, but the choice of meat as the source of protein is particularly noteworthy in the light of relatively recent laboratory findings which show meat to contain all the amino acids now known to be essential to health.
Including lots of fat in a reducing diet is much more startling to most people than putting in large quantities of protein. Even physicians and nutritionists find it hard to adjust their thinking to this basic change in diet planning for weight reduction. Over many years, fats have been evaluated largely in terms of their high calorie count and, for that reason, they have been kept to the minimum in slimming programs. “Trim off all visible fat,” the diet sheets used to stipulate when they listed lamb chops, steak or good roast beef in the menu column. Now along comes a diet which actually advises getting extra fat to be eaten along with the meat.

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Odille
Terranora, northern NSW, Australia
Fem 53, 170 cms - doing Atkins
SW 131 / CW 103 / GW 64 (kgs)
SW 288.5 / CW 227 / GW 140(lbs)
BP-Nov05 176/96; Dec 05 154/84; Jan 06 122/80; Mar 06 110/76