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 diseases. Modern dietary recommendations by health organizations, and national health agencies corroborate this.
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.
Early life
Ancel Benjamin Keys was born in Colorado Springs on January 26, 1904, the son of Benjamin Pious Keys (1883–1961) and Carolyn Emma Chaney (1885–1960), the sister of actor and director Lon Chaney (1883–1930). 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". He eventually finished his secondary education and was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley in 1922. 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 used this perfusion method to study the effects of adrenaline and vasopressin ("pitressin") on gill fluid flow and osmotic regulation in fishes. He 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 proved 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. From these studies 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.
Development of K-rations
thumb|An example of a [[K-ration dinner. All the components were intended to fit into a box which would fit into a soldier's pocket]]
In 1936, Keys was offered a position at the Mayo Foundation in Rochester, where he continued his studies in physiology. 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: