November 23, 2004
 
  Dr. Ancel Keys, 100, Promoter of Mediterranean Diet, Dies
 
     By JANE E. BRODY

     Ancel Keys, the Minnesota physiologist who put saturated fat on the
     map as a major cause of heart disease and was the first scientist to
     champion the health value of a Mediterranean-style diet, died on
     Saturday in Minneapolis. He was 100 and had remained intellectually
     active through his 97th year. His death was announced by the
     University of Minnesota, where he had long worked.

     From humble beginnings - he was born on Jan. 26, 1904, in Colorado
     Springs to teenagers who soon after moved to Berkeley, Calif., to find
     work - Dr. Keys built a career that changed the thinking on many
     aspects of physiology and health, including the effects of starvation
     and the factors responsible for the most devastating epidemic in the
     industrialized world, coronary heart disease.

     He was the founder in 1939 of what became a world-famous research
     facility, the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene at the University of
     Minnesota School of Public Health, and he was its director for 33
     years.

     In the 1940's, a serendipitous event made his name known to millions.
     Because he had performed blood tests on himself in the Andes to
     determine the body's response to high altitudes, the War Department
     asked him to develop pocket-size food rations for World War II
     paratroopers. The result was the infamous K ration, named for its
     developer and distributed to hundreds of thousands of American troops
     during the war. Though complaints about the small nutrition-packed
     meals abounded, grateful recipients included 25 soldiers who were
     stranded for 10 days in a half-submerged transport plane in the South
     Pacific with nothing but 25 K rations and a gallon of water.

     The knowledge that millions of people were starving during the war
     prompted Dr. Keys to embark on another government project, a
     groundbreaking study of the effects of starvation and how best to
     re-feed starving people. With 36 volunteers among men doing menial
     jobs as conscientious objectors, he studied the effects of starvation
     and re-feeding on the body and mind. As the men became increasingly
     emaciated in three months of eating only root vegetables, dark bread
     and simple starchy foods and walking 22 miles a week, they became
     depressed, irritable, sexless, fatigued and always hungry, licking
     their plates to consume every calorie of their meager rations. The
     findings were detailed in a book published in 1950, "Biology of Human
     Starvation," a classic in the field.

     Among his colleagues in medicine and biology, Dr. Keys, who earned two
     Ph.D.'s, one in biology from Berkeley and the other in physiology from
     Kings College in Cambridge, England, is perhaps best known for his
     landmark epidemiological research, the so-called Seven Countries
     study, begun in 1958 and lasting decades. This ambitious study of
     12,000 healthy middle-aged men living in Italy, the Greek Islands,
     Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Finland, Japan and the United States lent
     convincing population support to the studies that had pointed to
     saturated fats as the cause of the arterial blockages known to result
     in heart attacks.

     The Seven Countries study, also published in a book issued in 1980 by
     Harvard Press, revealed that the Mediterranean diet, rich in fruits
     and vegetables, pasta, bread and olive oil with meat, fish and dairy
     products used as condiments, was highly protective against heart
     disease even though the diet derived more than 35 percent of its
     calories from fat.

     Japan, where vegetables, rice and fish were the mainstays of a diet
     very low in saturated fat and fat of any kind, had the next lowest
     rate of heart disease among the countries studied. But in Finland and
     the United States, where a diet rich in saturated animal fats
     prevailed (the Finns often spread butter on their cheese), the
     coronary rates were about 10 times as high.

     Dr. Henry Blackburn, who succeeded Dr. Keys at the laboratory, said:
     "The Seven Countries study demonstrated the preventability of heart
     attacks. They were not a natural aging phenomenon, or genetically
     predetermined or acts of God."

     Dr. Keys added to the evidence for major cardiac risk factors through
     a study of executives. Starting in 1947, each year the survivors from
     a group of 283 initially healthy men returned for checkups, including
     questions about their habits and lifestyles. After 40 years of
     follow-up, 54 of the men were still living. Most others had died of
     heart disease.

     Dr. Keys is survived by his wife, Margaret; a daughter, Carrie
     D'Andrea of Bloomington, Minn.; and a son, Dr. Henry Keys, of Albany.
     Another daughter, Martha McLain, was murdered in 1991 while on
     vacation in Jamaica with her family.

     With his wife, a biochemist whom he married in 1939, Dr. Keys wrote
     two best-selling books, "Eat Well and Stay Well" and "How to Eat Well
     and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way." These and a third book they
     wrote, "The Benevolent Bean," had the kind of recipes that Dr. Keys's
     studies suggested kept heart disease at bay. The royalties enabled the
     Keyses to build a home in Naples, where they ate nourishing
     Mediterranean meals.
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