Russell Henry Chittenden Tells the Truth a Century Ago

Such narrow-minded thinking should have been stopped by 1905 when Russell Henry Chittenden, Yale UniversityProfessor of Physiological Chemistry, published his scientific findings on human protein needs in his classic book,Physiological Economy in Nutrition.²  Professor Chittenden believed Dr. Voit had cause and effect reversed: people did not become prosperous because they ate high protein diets, but rather they ate meat and other expensive high protein foods because they could afford them.   One hundred years ago he wrote, “We are all creatures of habit, and our palates are pleasantly excited by the rich animal foods with their high content of proteid (protein), and we may well question whether our dietetic habits are not based more upon the dictates of our palates than upon scientific reasoning or true physiological needs.”

He reasoned that we should know the minimal protein requirement for the healthy man (and woman), and believed that any protein intake beyond our requirements could cause injury to our body, especially to the liver and kidneys. As he explained it, “Fats and carbohydrates when oxidized in the body are ultimately burned to simple gaseous products…easily and quickly eliminated…”  “With proteid (protein) foods…when oxidized, (they) yield a row of crystalline nitrogenous products which ultimately pass out of the body through the kidneys.  (These nitrogen-based protein byproducts) – frequently spoken of as toxins – float about through the body and may exercise more or less of a deleterious influence upon the system, or, being temporarily deposited, may exert some specific or local influence that calls for their speedy removal.”  With these few words Professor Chittenden explained the deleterious effects of diets high in protein and meat – consequences too few practicing doctors know about today.

The First Scientific Experiments on Our Protein Needs

Professor Chittenden’s first experiment was on himself.  For nine months, he recorded his own body weight, which decreased from 143 pounds (65 Kg) to 128 pounds (58 kg) on his new diet of one-third the protein that Dr. Voit recommended. Chittenden’s health remained excellent and he described his condition as being with “greater freedom from fatigue and muscular soreness than in previous years of a fuller dietary.”  He had suffered from arthritis of his knee and discovered that by reducing his intake of meat his condition disappeared and his “sick headaches” and bilious attacks (abdominal pains) no longer appeared periodically as before; plus he fully maintained his mental and physical activity, with a protein intake of about 40 grams a day.

Chittenden performed valid scientific studies by collecting data on the daily dietary and urine histories of his subjects (including himself) to determine protein utilization. Because he was contradicting the known “truths” of his time, he proceeded with extreme caution with his further investigations.  He organized three controlled trials with increasing demands for testing the adequacy of diets lower in protein than commonly recommended.

The first trial involved a group of five men connected with Yale University, leading active lives but not engaged in very muscular work.  On a low-protein diet (62 grams daily) for 6 months, they all remained healthy and in positive nitrogen balance (more protein went into, than out of, their bodies).  The second trial used 13 male volunteers from the Hospital Corps of the U.S. army. They were described as doing moderate work with one day of vigorous activity at the gymnasium.  They remained in good health on 61 grams of protein daily.  His final trial was with 8 Yale student athletes, some of them with exceptional records of athletic events.  They ate an average of 64 grams of protein daily while maintaining their athletic endeavors, and improving their performance by a striking 35 percent.  Following these studies, Chittenden in 1904 concluded that 35–50 g of protein a day was adequate for adults, and individuals could maintain their health and fitness on this amount.  Studies over the past century have consistently confirmed Professor Chittenden’s findings, yet you would hardly know it with the present day popularity of high protein diets.

We’ve known for decades that beans have an exceptionally low glycemic index. You give someone cooked beans, peas, or lentils and they don’t even get half the blood sugar spike that they would get with the same amount of carbs in the form of bread, pasta, or potatoes. So if you’re going to eat some high glycemic food like white rice, consider having some beans with it, and the more beans the better. If you check out my 3-min video Beans and the Second Meal Effect, you can see that as the subjects’ bean to rice ratio increases, cardiometabolic risk factors continually improve. Substituting one serving of beans for one serving of white rice was associated with a 35 percent lower risk of metabolic syndrome (pre-diabetes).

Why do beans have such a low glycemic index? Maybe it’s because they’ve got so much fiber that absorption is just slower or something? It was this study that blew everyone’s minds.

It started about as expected. Give people bread for breakfast, and they get big spikes in blood sugar and insulin levels, but give the same amount of carbs in lentil form and you blunt the effect. (Lentils for breakfast? Well, the Brits like baked beans on their toast, but I’ve started using a handful of sprouted lentils in my breakfast smoothie. See A Better Breakfast and Antioxidants Sprouting Up). What they did different, though, was follow through to lunch.

For lunch both groups got the same meal; they both got bread. Those that had lentils for breakfast, though, had less of a glycemic reaction to the bread. At the time they called it the “lentil effect,” but subsequent studies found chickpeas appear to work just as well. It has since been dubbed the “second meal effect.” Eat lentils for dinner, and then for breakfast, even if forced to drink sugar water, we have better glycemic control. Beans moderate your blood sugar not just at the meal we eat them, but even hours later or the next day.

How is that even possible? The mystery has since been solved. Remember what our gazillions of gut bacteria do with fiber? They produce compounds like propionate with it (see Fawning Over Flora and Boosting Good Bacteria in the Colon Without Probiotics) that get absorbed into our system and slow down gastric emptying—the rate at which food leaves our stomach—so we don’t get as much of a sugar rush. It’s like symbiosis. We feed our good bacteria and they feed us back. So, we have a bean burrito for supper and by the next morning it’s time for our gut bacteria to eat that same burrito and the by-products they create may affect how our breakfast is digested.

Researchers figured this out by giving people rectal infusions of the amount of propionate your good bacteria might make from a good burrito, and the stomach relaxes within minutes. I guess if you forgot to eat any kind of beans for supper and need to blunt the effect of your breakfast doughnut, it’s theoretically not too late—but in general I encourage people to administer their food orally

On the basis of concerns from the American Heart Association and consumer groups, the Federal Trade Commission carried out successful legal action—upheld by the Supreme Court—to compel the egg industry to cease and desist from false and misleading advertising that eggs had no harmful effects on health.

Over the years, cholesterol concerns resulted in severe economic loss through a reduction in egg consumption, so the egg industry created a “National Commission on Egg Nutrition” to combat the public health warnings with ads that said things like “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that eating eggs in any way increases the risk of heart attack.” The U.S. Court of Appeals found such outright deception patently false and misleading.

Even the tobacco industry wasn’t that brazen, trying only to introduce the element of doubt, arguing that the relationship between smoking and health remains an open question. In contrast, the egg ads made seven claims, each of which was determined by the courts to be blatantly false. The Court determined the egg industry ads were “false, misleading, and deceptive.” Legal scholars note that, like Big Tobacco, the egg industry did more than just espouse one side of a genuine controversy, but flatly denied the existence of scientific evidence.

Over the last 36 years, the American Egg Board has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to convince people eggs are not going to kill them—and it’s working. From one of their internal strategy documents that I was able to get a hold of: “In combination with aggressive nutrition science and public relations efforts, research shows that the advertising has been effective in decreasing consumers concerns over eggs and cholesterol/heart health.”

Currently, they’re targeting moms. Their approach is to “surround moms wherever they are.” They pay integration fees for egg product placement in TV shows. To integrate eggs into The Biggest Loser, for example, could be a million dollars, according to their internal documents. Getting some kids storytime reading program to integrate eggs may only take half a million, though. The American Egg Board keeps track of who is, and is not, a “friend-of-eggs.” They even pay scientists $1500 to sit and answer questions like, “What studies can help disassociate eggs from cardiovascular disease?”

From the beginning, their arch nemesis was the American Heart Association, with whom they fought a major battle over cholesterol. In documents retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act featured in my 6-min video Eggs and Cholesterol: Patently False and Misleading Claims, you can see even the USDA repeatedly chastises the egg industry for misrepresenting the American Heart Association position. In a draft letter to magazine editors, the egg industry tried to say that the “American Heart Association changed its recommendations to approve an egg a day in 2000 and eventually eliminated its number restrictions on eggs in 2002,” to which the head of USDA’s poultry research and promotion programs had to explain that the “change” in 2000 wasn’t a change at all. Nothing in the guidelines or recommendations was changed. What happened was that in response to a question posed by someone planted in the audience, Heart Association reps acknowledged that even though eggs are among the most concentrated source of cholesterol in the diet, an individual egg has under 300mg of cholesterol and could technically fit under the 300 mg daily limit. In 2002, they eliminated the specific mention of eggs for consistency sake, but the American Heart Association insists that they haven’t changed their position and continue to warn consumers about eggs.

The guidelines on the AHA website at the time explained that since one egg has 213 and the limit for people with normal cholesterol is 300 you could fit an egg in if you cut down on all other animal products. If you have an egg for breakfast, for example, and some coffee, some skinless turkey breast for lunch, etc., you could end up at over 500 by the end of the day, nearly twice the recommended limit. So if you are going to eat an egg, the Heart Association instructed, we would need to “substitute vegetables for some of the meat, drink our coffee black, and watch for hidden eggs in baked goods.” Furthermore, the limit for folks with high cholesterol is 200mg a day, which may not even allow a single egg a day.

This is how the senior director of nutrition education at the American Egg Board’s Egg Nutrition Center characterized the American Heart Association guidelines: “Maybe I’m being overly sensitive, but this reads like: ‘If you insist on having those deadly high cholesterol eggs your penalty will be to eat vegetables and you can’t even have the yummy steak and creamy coffee you love. Really it’s not worth eating eggs. Oh, and if you think you’ll be able to enjoy some delicious baked goods, forget it, the deadly eggs are there too!’”