Keto Adaptation, Diet and Policy

If you follow a low-carb diet, sooner or later it will be obvious. You are not as hungry anymore. You enjoy your food, but you no longer eat because hunger is ever-present. This was a welcomed surprise as my snacks disappeared. Rarely do I still eat one. This is usually when my blood sugars drop. Those days I fall off nutritional Ketosis.

At this point, my goal is tweety to thirty net carbs. I know it works, and my blood sugars are much better. That this was the way diabetes was treated at some point is true. But it was not just diabetes. This is how obesity was treated as well.

People were told to avoid bread, potatoes, pasta, and other starchy foods. This was the reality of the 1950s. It was effective diet advice. People who worked in the field. Especially doctors specializing in endocrinology knew this. In Raymond Greene’s 1951 Practice of Endocrinology, it reads to recommend this. In essence, it’s a keto diet.

It leads to satiety, and the pounds drop, if by magic. This changed with President Dwight D Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1957. People were living longer and we were having an epidemic of heart disease. That people were living longer seemed to be a noneffect, just that heart attacks were more common.

A culprit had to be found.

Of course, the American diet came under examination.

There are some things that were common at the time, that from our perch in the 21st century seem strange. I would like to point to them.

* People ate more fat, in particular animal fat. It was not uncommon for housewives to save bacon and turkey, sometimes duck fat, for later cooking.
* The American diet was far less ultra-processed. This was still in the future, but this is the decade where TV Dinners first made an appearance.
* Most people ate two to three meals a day. Snacking was frowned upon.
* Obesity was rare.
* Americans were not obsessed with physical exercise. This was to start in the 1970–80s.
* Americans, for the most part, ate home-cooked meals. Middle-class families could live good middle-class lives on one income. Yes, there are qualifiers to this with both class and race. But to keep it simple, for this piece, let's close our eyes to that other ugly reality.
* Yes, people still ate some processed foods we are…