HOLIDAY MAGAZINE ARTICLE JUNE 1950 AN EAT-ALL-YOU-WANT REDUCING DIET WRITTEN BY ELIZABETH WOODY
The other people in the hotel dining room never dreamed that a believe-it-or-not diet development was being demonstrated at the table for two by the window.
Our waiter set down a silver platter of beautifully browned, sizzling-hot sirloin steak. The doctor picked up the carving knife and fork, nudged the dish of French fried potatoes aside a few inches to give himself elbowroom, cut a thick slice of steak and transferred it neatly to my plate. The steak was just the way I like it, rich, crisp brown on the surface, shading quickly to bright pink in the middle. Juice, thin, clear and the color of good port, ran at the touch of my knife and fork.
“That’s only a starter,” the doctor said. “On this diet you can eat as much meat as you like and still lose weight. You can even help yourself to French fried potatoes, but don’t ask for seconds on them. You’re allowed one average helping of potatoes, or of any one of half a dozen other foods at each of the day’s three meals. I’ll give you the list later.”
Meat and potatoes to take off weight!
“You can’t mean an unlimited amount of meat, surely,” I protested. “If I ate all the steak I wanted, I’d top the thousand-calories-a-day mark before I knew it.”
“There’s no calorie counting on this reducing diet,” the doctor answered. “And there’s no limit, absolutely none, to the amount of meat you can eat. The first course of each meal is half a pound or more of fresh meat with the fat. The main stipulation is that you don’t skip the fat. One part of fat by weight to three parts of lean, always and invariably. A few Eskimos among your ancestors might come in handy.”
Fats to the fat? It sounded like a daydream of the pleasingly plump, and an earnest nutritionist’s nightmare.
“A lot has been found out recently,” the doctor continued, “about the part fats in the diet play in the rate at which our bodies burn up food and excess body fat. When we go up to my office, I’ll show you some of the reports in the more recent medical literature. I think I can promise you a few surprises. First, though, let’s concentrate on having lunch.”
THE INTERVIEW
The next surprise came sooner than I expected. Between bites of steak, I turned my attention to the potatoes to find that they, like the steak, were perfection-fluffy inside, crunchy outside and blistering hot as only French fried potatoes can be. I tasted them and reached for the salt.
“I was waiting for that,” laughed my companion. “Why didn’t you salt the steak?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t seem to need it. Wasn’t it salted when it was cooked?”
“Not a grain. Broiled meat has so much flavor of its own that lots of people, we find, hardly notice when it isn’t salted. Potatoes, now, are something else again, I’ll admit. However, the rule has to be No Salt. The sodium ion in salt traps water in the tissues. Even the small amount of salt the average cook uses will slow up or stop the weight loss. Our dieters agreed, though, that skipping the salt isn’t half as bad as it sounds at the beginning. Anyway, wouldn’t you be willing to make some concessions in your taste habits if you knew you could lose weight without any strenuous exercise, without stopping eating as long as you’d like a little more and without ever getting that gone feeling that comes from being hungry? Here, let me give you another piece of steak.”
Before I started work on my second serving of steak, I reapplied myself to the potatoes. Salt or no salt, they really were good. Somehow, eating potatoes-and fried potatoes at that- with a clear conscience gave them a savor they had never had before. Black coffee (unsweetened) ended the meal and I followed the doctor from the dining room feeling well fed and at peace with the world.
We crossed a hotel lobby surprisingly large for a city the size of Wilmington, Delaware, threaded a maze of corridors, crossed a street and came out finally in the Nemours Building, a main office building of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. Sharing an elevator with a trio of trim little secretaries, we rode to the eleventh floor, where a sign with a directional arrow, read, “Medical Division.” We went down the corridor toward a large corner office to keep our appointment with Du Pont’s Medical Director, Dr. George H. Gehrmann. My companion was Dr. A.W. Pennington, a member of Doctor Gehrmann’s staff.
I knew Doctor Gehrmann by reputation as a pioneer in industrial medicine, with Du Pont since 1915, and head of the company’s Medical Division since 1926. I found him a ruddy-faced man of medium height in, I estimated, his middle or late fifties. At the beginning of the visit it seemed to me that he harbored a few of the professional man’s usual misgivings about talking to a reporter, but he soon warmed to his subject and, leaning back in his desk chair and looking out over the Wilmington rooftops, began relating a dramatic food story.
THE QUEST
“As we see it here in the Medical Division,” Doctor Gehrmann began, “our job is to help keep Du Pont employees healthy enough to work at peak effectiveness through all their earning years, and when people are hale and hearty that’s likely to be a good long time. We also feel that workers ought to have enough energy left after the working day to enjoy the things they do, the people they see and the places they go in the leisure time.”
“We’ve licked a lot of problems, we’ve learned a good many things about preventive medicine and, by and large, we feel we’ve done a better-than-average job in helping Du Pont people get proper medical care. About two years ago, however, we faced up to the fact that we weren’t making the headway we wanted to make toward solving a tough problem confronting our company and other companies too.”
“We hadn’t found a satisfactory answer to the problem of overweight. Overweight is at the roots of many of the ills that plague us. Naturally, when a man or woman is too fat and carries an extra fifteen- or twenty-pound load around all day, that man or woman gets tired easily. Fatigue is bad enough, but vastly more important than fatigue is the close and proved relationship between obesity and many serious diseases. Obesity is what physicians call a predisposing factor in high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, heart diseases, diabetes, and nephritis. It is also a predisposing cause of osteo-arthritis and other crippling diseases.

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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