U scientist who invented K ration dies at 100

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Ben Cohen and Maura Lerner, Star Tribune

November 23, 2004

Ancel Keys, the University of Minnesota scientist who invented the K ration used during World War II and later fingered high cholesterol and fatty diets as chief culprits in heart disease, has died. He was 100.

Keys, who turned a spotlight on the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, died Saturday of natural causes at the Minneapolis assisted-living apartment he shared with his wife, Margaret.

One of the university's most colorful and influential scientists in the 20th century, he labored for years in a lab beneath the old football stadium, producing research that would reshape American notions of diet and health.

Keys demonstrated, through a landmark study on the eating habits of Minnesota businessmen in the 1950s, how fatty diets were linked to heart attacks. And he popularized the so-called Mediterranean diet, heavy on fruits and vegetables, light on fat and meat, with a touch of wine on the side.

Ancel Keys
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Keys, who was a professor of physiology at the university from 1936 to 1972, traveled the world studying the diets of thousands of men from different cultures. He poured his findings into the 1959 best-seller "Eat Well and Stay Well," which he wrote with Margaret Keys, and which led to his appearance on the cover of Time magazine in 1961. The Keyses lived in St. Paul for 35 years before retiring from the university in the 1970s.

His longevity seemed to reaffirm his central theory: that eating well can help people live longer. Wiry and energetic, he practiced what he preached, eating a lean and healthy diet for decades. And he was a blunt-spoken evangelist when it came to food.

"People should know the facts," he once told an interviewer. "Then if they want to eat themselves to death, let them."

Daughter Carrie D'Andrea of Bloomingon said her father's attention to his diet was key to his longevity. "Oh, that is why he lived so long," she said.

Early adventures

Keys was born in Colorado Springs, Colo., an only child with an adventurous spirit. He worked in a lumber camp, shoveled bat droppings in an Arizona cave and mined for gold in Colorado, all before finishing high school. He enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1922, but took time off to sail to China as a crewman aboard the liner President Wilson, where the diet, he later recalled, "was mostly alcohol."

He eventually returned to college, earning a bachelor's degree in economics and political science and a master's degree in zoology at the University of California. By 1930 he had a Ph.D. in oceanography and biology from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

But his career didn't take shape until he went to Copenhagen to work with Nobel Prize winner August Krogh, a physiologist -- someone who studies bodily processes and function. Inspired, Keys earned a second Ph.D., in physiology, from Cambridge University in England and became an instructor at Harvard University.

In 1935 he launched his first exotic study, on the effects of high altitude on the human body -- in this case, on copper miners in the Andes Mountains of Chile. The next year he was lured to the University of Minnesota, where he began studying the physical differences between athletes and nonathletes. Eventually he built his lab beneath the university's Memorial Stadium ("We get a rumble on every touchdown," he once joked).

In 1941, Keys was asked to help develop an army ration that soldiers could carry in combat. He bought the makings at Witt's, a downtown Minneapolis market, and tested them on soldiers at Fort Snelling. When the army mass-produced the packages, he was surprised to see them marked with the letter K, for Keys. The K ration was born.

During World War II he also served as a special assistant to the secretary of war.

Afterward, Keys conducted one of his most famous studies, the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. He fed 36 volunteers, all conscientious objectors, a "semistarvation" diet, mirroring the conditions found in occupied Europe. The men lost an average of 25 percent of their weight, and Keys found that their hearts shrank, endurance fell and personalities changed. The study, he concluded, held a powerful lesson for those in charge of rebuilding postwar Europe. "Starved people cannot be taught democracy."

Yet there was another lesson in starvation. Keys noted that deaths from heart disease dropped dramatically in countries where food supplies had run short during the war. And he started looking for the connection.

He found his answer through a remarkable study of 286 middle-aged businessmen from Minneapolis and St. Paul that began in 1946. He concluded that those who suffered heart attacks had high levels of cholesterol -- a fatty substance -- in their bloodstreams. And he pinned that on their high-fat diets.

His travels around the world only confirmed his suspicions. He found, for example, that Japanese men in the United States ate three times the amount of fat as their counterparts in Japan and had 10 times the rate of heart attacks.

Making headlines

When Keys published his findings, he stunned postwar America, not to mention the dairy and meat industries.

His message, which now seems routine, was anything but when it made headlines in late 1950s.

Eat less meat, eggs and dairy products. Eat more fish, chicken, calves' liver, Italian food, Chinese food, fresh fruit, vegetables and casseroles.

A colleague, Dr. Henry Blackburn, former head of the university's Epidemiology Department, said Keys brought much fame to the University of Minnesota. "He's a pioneer, the founder of the whole area of the physiology of human health," he once said in an interview.

Critics faulted him for downplaying other risks of heart disease, such as stress and high blood pressure. But Keys continued to hammer home the same message for years.

At one point he blamed heart disease on "the North American habit of making the stomach the garbage-disposal unit for a long list of harmful foods."

At the same time he dismissed appetite suppressants as "dangerous crutches for a weak will" and said fad diets were "for the birds, if you don't like birds."

In retirement, he and Margaret lived in their Pioppi, Italy, and Minneapolis homes. He kept working on his research into the 1990s, last publishing new findings in 2000. His daughter said he kept fit by building rock walls, gardening, walking and swimming. About three years ago the Keyses sold their home in Italy. They moved into assisted living at the Kenwood Retirement Community a year ago.

In 1991, his 41-year-old daughter, Martha, an artist, was shot and killed while vacationing in Jamaica with her husband.

He is survived by his wife Margaret of Minneapolis; daughter Carrie D'Andrea of Bloomington; son Dr. Henry Keys of Voorheesville, N.Y.; eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Services will be held at 11 a.m., Dec. 4, Washburn-McCreavy Funeral Chapel, W. 50th St. and Hwy. 100., Edina.