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in the dietetic ward of Bellevue Hospital under the strictest of medical supervision, eating an exclusive diet of meat, for a solid year. The aim of the project was not to “prove” something, but merely to get at the facts and answer the prevailing questions of the time: Would the men get scurvy? Would they suffer from other deficiency diseases? What would be the effect on the circulatory system? On calcium levels? On the kidneys? On their weight?
    Lest anyone think this was a quaint little “experiment” supervised by a couple of country quacks, let’s look at the committee assembled to supervise this dietetic experiment: from Harvard University, Dr. Lawrence Henderson, Dr. Ernest Hooton, and Dr. Percy Howe; from Cornell University Medical College, Dr. Walter Niles; from the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Clark Wissler; from Johns Hopkins University, Dr. William McCallum and Dr. Raymond Pearl; from the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology, Dr. Eugene DuBois and Dr. Graham Lusk; from the University of Chicago, Dr. Edwin O. Jordan; from the Institute of American Meat Packers, Dr. C. Robert Moulton; and a physician in private practice, Dr. Clarence W. Lieb.
    Not exactly “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”
    This is how the experiment went: For the first 3 weeks, Stefansson and Anderson were fed the standard diet of the time: fruits, cereals, bacon and eggs, and vegetables. (Notice that there were no fast foods, no snacks, and no vending-machine fare available then, so by today’s standards, the “ordinary” diet was already light-years better than what we eat now.) During those first 3 weeks, the two guys were given preliminary checkups and were basically free to come and go as they pleased. After the first 3 weeks, they went on the all-meat diet and were more or less under house arrest. Neither of them was permitted at any time, day or night, to be out of sight of a supervising doctor or a nurse.
    One interesting sidebar: Anderson was able to eat anything he liked as often as he wanted, provided that it came under the experimental definition of meat: steaks, chops, brains fried in bacon fat, boiled short ribs, chicken, fish, liver, and bacon. But because Stefansson had reported in one of his books, My Life with the Eskimo, that he had become very ill when he had to go two or three weeks on just lean meat (“caribou so skinny that there was no appreciable fat”), DuBois, who headed the experiment, suggested that for a while they try a lean-meat-only diet on Stefansson to contrast the results with those of Anderson, who was eating whatever mix of fat and meat he felt like. They continued to give Anderson as much fat as he liked, but Stefansson was limited to chopped fatless meat.
    Stefansson wrote:
The symptoms brought on at Bellevue by an incomplete meat diet (lean without fat) were exactly the same as in the Arctic, except that they came on faster—diarrhea and a feeling of general baffling discomfort. Up north the Eskimos and I had been cured immediately when we got some fat. DuBois now cured me the same way, by giving me fat sirloin steaks, brains fried in bacon fat, and things of that sort. In two or three days I was all right, but I had lost considerable weight. If yours is a meat diet then you simply must have fat with your lean; otherwise you would sicken and die. 8
    For the rest of the year, both men were kept on a diet of meat and fat in whatever proportion they liked, and the experiment went off without a hitch. Every few weeks, with DuBois supervising, they would run around the reservoir in Central Park, then run up to DuBois’s house, going up the stairs two or three at a time, after which they would plop down on cots and have their breathing, pulse rate, and other measurements taken. These tests showed that their stamina increased the longer they stayed on the meat diet.
    In 1930, DuBois and associates published the results of the study in the American Journal of Biological Chemistry .