Dare to Be 100: Fat, Carbs, Calories

These three items were the centerpiece of my early science life. I wrote my honors thesis at Williams College about arteriosclerosis which at that time was considered to be heavily influenced by dietary fat. Then after medical school I entered a wonderful time of life learning much about F, Cs, and Cs. The 1960s overflowed. The high point of those years was those spent in the intellectual and physical embrace of two multi-million dollar research grants from the NIH. The first dealt with the control of cholesterol synthesis, and the second "The Effect of Diet on the Metabolism of Fat In Man." This second grant supported a five-bed metabolic study unit at the Lankenau Hospital in Overbrook, Pennsylvania. The study beds were staffed with full nutritional and biochemical backup as we fed specific formula diets of varying calorie amount and constituency to our volunteer experimental subjects whom we paid $10 a day for all the inconvenience and discomfort they endured for the five to 60 weeks of the particular study. These generated dozens of high impact research papers in the best journals, book chapters, and international lectures. Along the way we spent an amazing year, 1962-3, in Munich where I did research with Professor Feodor Lynen again dealing with fatty acid synthesis. He won the Nobel Prize the next year. Fat and carbohydrate are made of the same three elements, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, in specific amounts and conformations. One critical difference lies in the fa...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news