Ancel Keys taught public importance of eating well

By Myrna Oliver
Los Angeles Times

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Dr. Ancel Keys, best known for putting the K in K-rations by assembling meals that could be carried into combat during World War II, and who was dubbed "Mr. Cholesterol" for demonstrating the relationship between a fatty diet and heart disease, died Nov. 20 in Minneapolis. He was 100.

Decades ahead of diet gurus, the University of Minnesota physiologist determined through his meticulous but pragmatic studies what people needed, as he put it in the title of the 1959 book he wrote with his chemist wife, Margaret, to "Eat Well and Stay Well."

"There is no single person whose contribution to understanding the causation and potential for prevention of heart disease has matched Ancel's," Dr. Darwin Labarthe, a cardiovascular epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said in January at the celebration of Dr. Keys' centenary.

His spare K-ration meal perhaps was his best-known and his most quickly completed accomplishment. But it signaled his lifelong effort to determine what people needed to eat to function and survive.

By 1941, the University of California, Berkeley and Cambridge-educated Dr. Keys had developed enough respect among physiologists that he was tapped by the War Department to assemble a nonperishable, ready-to-eat meal that would fit in a pocket.

With little or no research, Dr. Keys, who had founded the University of Minnesota Lab of Physiological Hygiene two years earlier, went to a Minneapolis grocery and rummaged through the shelves. He selected compact packets of hard biscuits, dry sausage, chocolate bars and hard candy.

He tested the 28-ounce, 3,200-calorie result on six soldiers in training at Minnesota's Fort Snelling, and determined that the rations provided necessary energy and satiety.

"The meals were palatable," one solder said, according to a 1941 Los Angeles Times story, "better than nothing."

The Army — later adding chewing gum, toilet paper and four cigarettes to each packet — began producing the meals and dubbed them K-rations, presumably in Dr. Keys' honor.

He served as a special assistant to the secretary of war and later an executive in the Office of Lend Lease. Privy to information coming out of Europe, he became concerned about the effects on nutrition deprivation on the war-torn population.

With the War Department's permission, in 1944, he conducted the six-month Minnesota Starvation Experiment with 36 volunteers who were conscientious objectors. Through scientifically administered semi-starvation diets, the men lost 25 percent of their body weight. Dr. Keys determined that the starvation shrunk their hearts, reduced endurance and to a lesser extent strength and even changed their personalities.

His study, later published under the title "Biology of Human Starvation," helped guide the rehabilitation of undernourished Europe after the war.

As statistics from war zones emerged, Dr. Keys observed that the death rate from coronary heart disease dropped as food supplies dwindled. At the same time, he was noticing in local obituary columns the large number of men's deaths caused by heart attacks.

The inquiry would define his career, land him on the cover of Time magazine in 1961 and earn him the nickname "Mr. Cholesterol."

In 1947, Dr. Keys tracked 286 Minneapolis-St. Paul businessmen between 45 and 54 and determined that those who suffered heart attacks had high serum cholesterol levels.

The rise in heart attacks in the United States, he found, closely paralleled the increased fat in the American diet.

"Americans have Sunday dinner every day," he said, and make the stomach "the garbage-disposal unit for a long list of harmful foods."

With that study and another survey of 12,763 men from 40 to 59 in the United States and six other countries, Dr. Keys showed not only that bloodstream cholesterol was the major factor in heart disease, but also that saturated fats were the major causes of bloodstream cholesterol.

He began to advocate and popularize the Mediterranean diet. He and his wife devised recipes and menus, writing the best-selling cookbook and guide "Eat Well and Stay Well." They followed that with "The Benevolent Bean" in 1967 and "How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way" in 1975.

Dr. Keys, 5 feet 7 inches and 155 pounds, practiced what he preached. Nevertheless, he was reluctant to attribute his longevity to his diet. "Very likely," he told the news media on his 100th birthday Jan. 26. "But no proof."

The cause of his death was not disclosed.

Dr. Keys is survived by his wife of 65 years, Margaret, one daughter and one son. Another daughter died in 1991.