Good Calories, Bad Calories

This nihilistic argument became a mantra. “The evergrowing list of diets are an affirmation of the fact that no diet yet described is by itself a solution to the problem of obesity,” Bray said in his 1977 testimony to McGovern’s Senate committee. When Hirsch gave the review talk on obesity treatments at the Fourth International Congress on Obesity in 1981, he said: “The proliferation and seemingly endless concern with diets for the treatment of obesity suggests that this search is more motivated by financial rewards for the promoters rather than by an earnest desire to provide healthy and safe diets.”

This theme of financial rewards for the promoters of these diets would also be echoed repeatedly. A “common factor of reducing regimens is their commercialism—someone stands to make money from their promotion,” wrote George Mann, another veteran of Stare’s nutrition department, in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1974. This didn’t explain those like Pennington, Ohlson, Young, Gordon, or Kekwick and Pawan, who never wrote popular diet books and advocated similar advice to their obese patients, but it was an easy way to dismiss those like Atkins and Taller who did.^*129 They were “instant monetary nutritionists,” wrote Stare, who liked to point out that Atkins made over $1 million in one year from Diet Revolution, while simultaneously treating five hundred patients weekly in his “very lucrative private medical practice.”

But this conflict-of-interest accusation, as we’ve discussed, often cuts both ways. Stare and his Harvard colleagues played the decisive role in ensuring that anyone who claimed that carbohydrates were uniquely fattening would carry the taint of quackery. When White, Mayer, and Stare publicly condemned Herman Taller’s Calories Don’t Count it was a year after the Harvard nutrition department broke ground on a new $5 million building that was paid for largely through private donations. What Stare called the “lead gift” of $1,026,000 came from the General Foods Corporation, the maker of the very carbohydrate-rich Post cereals, Kool-Aid, and Tang breakfast drink. Over the next decade, Stare became the most public defender of sugar^*130 and additives in modern diets, while his department continued to receive significant funding from the sugar industry; from Oscar Mayer, the maker of hot dogs; from Coca-Cola and the National Soft Drinks Association. Would the resident nutritionists in Stare’s department have been more accepting of the efficacy of a diet that restricted refined carbohydrates and sugars if the money had come from another source? If so, would this have effected how other clinical investigators in the field came to interpret the controversy?