Keys, Ancel (1904–2004)

Ancel Keys was an American scientist who did pioneering work on the relationship between diet and health, particularly on the relationship between dietary fat and heart disease. Keys and his wife Margaret were the first American promoters of the Mediterranean diet, coauthoring Eat Well and Stay Well, an immensely popular cookbook. The discovery of a link between diet and heart disease landed Keys on the cover of Time magazine in 1961 and garnered him the nickname ‘Mr. Cholesterol.’

Keys was born in Colorado Springs in 1904, an only child. His family moved to San Francisco just before the devastating April 1906 earthquake, then across San Francisco Bay to Berkeley. While in elementary school, he was identified as one of the 1,528 ‘gifted’ children studied by Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman.

Keys attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a B.A. in economics and [Page 579]political science, an M.S. in biology, and a Ph.D. in oceanography and biology. He earned a second Ph.D. in physiology at Cambridge. In 1936, Keys became a professor of physiology at the University of Minnesota. In 1939, Keys founded the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. A new quantitative human biology, physiological hygiene combined physiology, nutrition, epidemiology, and prevention research.

In 1944, the U.S. government commissioned Keys to study human performance during nutritional deficiency states and to design lightweight but nutritionally adequate rations for paratroopers. Keys proposed an ambitious project to study the physiology of starvation, selecting 36 conscientious objectors, all volunteers. Keys and his colleagues brought the subjects to a baseline weight, gradually cut their daily diets from 3,500 calories to a semistarvation diet of 1,600 calories, and followed up with a rehabilitation diet. Keys then recorded the physiological changes associated with progressive food deprivation. Out of this research, Keys developed the emergency K-ration, used extensively by the U.S. military.

Immediately following World War II, Keys was perplexed by a set of seemingly counterintuitive observations: U.S. businessmen, presumably among the best-fed persons in the world, had high rates of heart disease, while in postwar Europe, cardiovascular disease rates had decreased sharply in the wake of reduced food supplies. In 1947, Keys helped establish cardiovascular epidemiology by launching the Twin Cities Study, a study of Minnesota businessmen, a few months before the better-known Framingham Heart Study began. Keys identified the relationship between dietary fat, blood cholesterol, and heart disease.

More ambitious was the Seven Countries Study, launched in 1958, which followed a sample of men in 16 distinct populations from seven nations throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. An extensive effort to characterize diet in detail via the collection and biochemical analysis of food samples distinguished the Seven Countries Study from the Framingham Study. Keys and his colleagues established that the risk of chronic disease differed greatly between populations and individuals and that these differences correlated with culturally determined lifestyle and dietary habits.

Keys retired in 1972 and maintained an active lifestyle until his death at age 100.