Ancel Keys

Ancel Benjamin Keys (January 26, 1904 – November 20, 2004) was an American physiologist who studied the influence of diet on health.

In particular, he hypothesized that replacing dietary saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced cardiovascular heart disease.

Modern dietary recommendations by health organizations, systematic reviews, and national health agencies corroborate this.

Ancel Keys was born in Colorado Springs in 1904 to Benjamin Pious Keys (1883–1961) and Carolyn Emma Chaney (1885–1960), the sister of actor and director Lon Chaney.

In 1906 they moved to San Francisco before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck.

Shortly after the disaster, his family relocated to Berkeley where he grew up.

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

During his youth, he left high school to pursue odd jobs, such as shoveling bat guano in Arizona, being a powder monkey in a Colorado mine, and working in a lumber camp.

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

At the University of California, Berkeley, 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.

He then returned to Berkeley, switched majors, and graduated with a B.A. in economics and political science (1925) and M.S. in zoology (1928).

For a brief time, he took up a job as a management trainee at Woolworth's, but returned to his studies at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla on a fellowship.

In 1930, he received his Ph.D. in oceanography and biology from UC Berkeley.

He was then awarded a National Research Council fellowship that took him to Copenhagen, Denmark to study under August Krogh at the Zoophysiological Laboratory for two years.

During his studies with Krogh, he studied fish physiology and contributed numerous papers on the subject.

Once in Copenhagen (1931), he continued to study fish physiology and developed techniques for gill perfusion that provided evidence that fish regulated their sodium by controlling chloride excretion through their gills.

He would also use this perfusion method to study the effects of adrenaline and vasopressin ("pitressin") on gill fluid flow and osmotic regulation in fishes.

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

This would prove useful for activities as diverse as determining the protein content in grasshopper eggs and anemia in humans.

While at Harvard's Fatigue Laboratory, he was inspired by his Cambridge mentor Joseph Barcroft's ascent to the top of Tenerife's highest peak and his subsequent reports.

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.

He 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.

He spent a couple of months at 9,500 feet (3,000 m.), and then five weeks at elevations of 15,000 to 20,000 feet (4,500 to 6,000 m.).

He 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.

It was from these studies that he outlined the phenomenon of human physiological adaptation to environmental changes as a predictable event, a novel idea in a time when such parameters as blood pressure and resting heart-rate were considered immutable characteristics of individuals.

Once his fellowship ended, he went to Cambridge but took some time off to teach at Harvard University, after which he returned to Cambridge and earned a second Ph.D. in physiology (1936).

While doing fish research at Scripps, Keys would use statistical regressions to estimate the weight of fish from their length, at that time a pioneering use of biostatistics.

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

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

In 1937, he left the Mayo Foundation to teach physiology at the University of Minnesota, where he founded the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene.

His earlier research on human physiology led to an assignment with the Army Quartermaster Corps, where they worked to develop a more portable and nonperishable ration that would provide enough calories to sustain soldiers (such as paratroopers) in the field for up to two weeks.

This development did not begin without some turbulence.

His colleague, Elsworth Buskirk, recalled:

"When it appeared that the U.S. would be in World War II, Keys went to the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute in Chicago to inquire about emergency rations. The story goes that he was told to go home and leave such things to the professionals. Undissuaded, he went to William Wrigley's office and secured $10,000 for the development of an emergency ration. Then, he went to the Cracker Jack Company. They couldn't supply money, but did provide the water-tight small box concept. The result was the K-ration in sealed Cracker Jack boxes."

Once the basic design had been completed, the Navy, through the National Research Council, funded the testing of the K-rations on its sailors to determine their feasibility as a temporary and mobile food source.

The initial ingredients of the K-ration were procured at a local Minneapolis grocery store—hard biscuits, dry sausage, hard candy, and chocolate.

The final product was different from Keys' original ingredients, but most of Keys' suggestions made it to the final product.

The rations weighed only 28 oz, but provided 3200 calories per day.

Keys studied starvation in men and published The Biology of Human Starvation (1950), which remains the only source of its kind.

He 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.