25 Facts About Ancel Keys

Ancel Benjamin Keys was an American physiologist who studied the influence of diet on health.

Ancel Keys examined the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease and was responsible for two famous diets: K-rations, formulated as balanced meals for combat soldiers in World War II, and the Mediterranean diet, which he popularized with his wife Margaret.

Ancel Benjamin Keys was born in Colorado Springs on January 26,1904, the son of Benjamin Pious Keys and Carolyn Emma Chaney, the sister of actor and director Lon Chaney.

Ancel Keys was intelligent as a boy; Lewis Terman, a noted psychologist and inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test, described him as intellectually "gifted".

Ancel Keys eventually finished his secondary education and was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley in 1922.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Ancel Keys initially studied chemistry, but was dissatisfied and took some time off to work as an oiler aboard the American President Lines ship SS President Wilson, which traveled to China.

Ancel Keys designed an improved Kjeldahl apparatus, which improved upon Krogh's earlier design, and allowed for more rapid determination of nitrogen content in biological samples.

Ancel Keys wrote up a proposal for an expedition to the Andes, suggesting the study could have practical value for Chilean miners who worked at high elevations.

Ancel Keys was given the go-ahead and, in 1935, assembled a team to study the effects of high altitude on the body, such as how it affects blood pressure.

Ancel Keys noted there was no good way of predicting how well humans might adapt to high altitude, even if they adapted well to medium altitudes, a problem for potential pilots in a time before pressure control had become practical.

In 1936, Ancel Keys was offered a position at the Mayo Foundation in Rochester, where he continued his studies in physiology.

Ancel Keys left after a year, citing an intellectually stifling environment where research was secondary to clinical "doc business" and playing bridge.

When it appeared that the US would be in World War II, Ancel Keys went to the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute in Chicago to inquire about emergency rations.

The war came to an end before the final results of the study could be published, but Ancel Keys sent his findings to various international relief agencies throughout Europe and, by 1950, he completed publication of his two-volume 1385-page Biology of Human Starvation.

Ancel Keys postulated a correlation between cholesterol levels and CVD and initiated a study of Minnesota businessmen.

At a 1955 expert meeting at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Ancel Keys presented his diet-lipid-heart disease hypothesis.

Ancel Keys had concluded that saturated fats as found in milk and meat have adverse effects, while unsaturated fats found in vegetable oils had beneficial effects.

Ancel Keys stated that of the 12,000 men in seven countries studied in 1960, those least likely to develop cardiovascular disease lived in Crete.

The Ancel Keys equation predicts the effect of saturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids in the diet on serum cholesterol levels.

Ancel Keys found that saturated fats increase total and LDL cholesterol twice as much as polyunsaturated fats lower them.

Together, Margaret and Ancel Keys co-authored three books, two of them bestsellers.

Ancel Keys appeared on the To Tell The Truth game show as the inventor of K-Rations, fooling two of the four panelists.

Ancel Keys received three notable awards: Commander, Order of the Lion of Finland, the McCollum Award from the American Society of Clinical Nutrition, and an honorary doctor of science from the University of Minnesota.

Ancel Keys died on November 20,2004, in Minneapolis, two months before his 101st birthday.

Ancel Keys has received criticism from the low-carbohydrate diet community, who have argued that his Seven Countries Study excluded countries that did not fit his hypothesis.