Much Of What We Know About High-Protein Diets Is Based On Outdated, Flawed Data

Prior to the identification of the micronutrients we call vitamins in the 1930s; nutrition science was mainly a science of animal energetic, or the study of how animals metabolize food into energy. Animal dynamic, in turn, was a science of animal deprivation. It was also a system of race.

The questions physiologists asked about animal energetic were straightforward: How much energy was required to keep an animal from starving under various conditions (for example, physical regimen, ambient temperature)? How much protein—specifically, in the early days, how much meat—was required to maintain the animal in nitrogen equilibrium, that is, to ensure that the quantity of nitrogen lost as urea in the urine was equal to that ingested? Efforts to measure metabolic rate by gauging the volume of carbon dioxide expelled in respiration went back at least to the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier’s experiments with guinea pigs in the 1780s, but for a long time, respirometry stayed clumsy and accountable to the interest that what an animal did under a respirometer hood did not represent a good approximation to what it did out in the world. So in most labs, the key methods of research into the 1910s were collecting animal waste and fasting animals, often to the death. A difference of animals was sacrificed by starvation: rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, cats, and dogs. Physiologists were partial to dogs, and canine hunger artists were cited with approval in the energetic literature into the 1950s. A dog in one lab in Tokyo was announced in 1898 to have endured 98 days without food before break down, having lost 65 percent of its body mass. 14 years later, physiologists at the University of Illinois disclosed they had fasted their dog Oscar 117 days before closure of the experiment: Oscar refused to palpable the increase in secreting nitrogen usually of late-stage mournfulness and in fact continued in such good spirits, as his handlers reported, that he had to be discreet as the fast went on from ascend out of and into his cage before and after his daily weighing to prevent he injure himself.

By – Abhishek Singh

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