The Lady Doctor Who Is The Reason We Count Calories Today
Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters was a best-selling diet doctor 100 years ago …
I started wondering, “When did food calorie counting start, and what is the origin of dieting through calorie restrictions?”
I learned that the concept of the calorie as it relates to food, not combustion, was popularized in the U.S. by an agricultural chemist, Wilbur O. Atwater, between the 1880s and his death in 1907. Atwater’s work bore a close relationship to Frederick Taylor’s, the engineer whose time-motion studies introduced the concept of efficiency and job “productivity” among factory workers, and whose “work” influenced the way corporations treat workers to this day. Both men were trying to systematize and analyze different human activities with an eye toward greater efficiency or profit.
Here’s what Atwater, who advocated thriftiness among individuals — and who said of poor people, “the destruction of the poor is their improvidence” — looked like:
Wilbur O. Atwater wasn’t counting calories … or was he?
Calorie counts back in these early days varied tremendously (and today as well — the FDA allows a whopping 20% variance between actual tested calorie counts and food labels — so a “100 calorie pack” of anything can easily contain as much as 120 calories or as little as 80 — but I’m sure you can guess which direction in which they usually vary). Early calorie counters did seem to understand that different foods were needed for proper nutrition, and they did recommend appropriate types of foods, for the most part, even while stating that only the calories consumed and expended mattered.
But the type of processed foods, fast foods, and restaurant meals we have today did not exist in the late 19th or early 20th centuries.
Only rich or better-off bourgeoisie like Atwater could afford to buy and eat enough food and be physically inactive enough to become chunky even as they lectured poorer people on thrift and calorie restriction.
The medical industry was also in its infancy during this time. At the end of the 19th century, Bayer was busy marketing heroin to mothers for their colicky babies, and penicillin would not be discovered until 1928.
But in 1918, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, a graduate of the UC Berkeley medical school, published Diet and Health With A Key to the Calories. Peters also wrote a weekly column for over 400 newspapers about women’s health and diet.
This book may seem like a dry, boring topic, but it was a massive bestseller. While Peters was volunteering for a war-related medical mission in Serbia (pictured above), she learned that her short, 110-page book had sold 2 million copies.
It’s written mostly in a light-hearted tone, and contains illustrations that would probably not be included in a diet book today, drawn by her nephew, reportedly age 8 at the time.
The book starts with:
Are You Thin and Do You Want to Gain?
Don’t Read This
Skip this chapter. It will not interest you in the least. I will come to you later.
I’ve read that Dr. Peters lived in Riverside County throughout most of her growing up years, and was a teacher at a local school. This is where my grandmother was from. Her mother owned a dressmaking business and the Loring Block across the street from the Mission Inn; her father had the Mission Inn’s barbershop.
I have yet to really write about my grandmother, but I’ll now give the facts: I was told by my mother’s high school friends (RHS ’40) that they were all “intimidated” by my grandmother, who was the main salesperson in the womenswear department at our local department store, Harris’ Co, for 25 years and called by many, “the most beautiful woman in Redlands.”
I know exactly what my grandmother would say about Dr. Peters’ “look” in the header of this article. In case you’re not sure, Dr. Peters is the short, stout one in the middle of the front row.
As soon as I started reading Dr. Peters’ book via Project Gutenberg, I knew that my grandmother had read it back and forth, up and down, from cover to cover. She was 17 years old when it came out. And was she ever a slim, trim “flapper.”
Dr. Peters had her nephew draw pictures illustrating healthful exercises. Here is one of them:
Arm circles, waist circles, touching toes — the whole nine yards. My grandmother, the slim, intimidating, never an ounce overweight, impeccably dressed Nana, did them one and all.
The attitude conveyed in Dr. Peters’ book is one everyone will be familiar with. While light-hearted and breezy, Peters leaves no doubt as to where fat people are at (primarily women).
“Mrs. Ima Gobbler is not really fat enough to be called a fat — ! She is only 40 or 50 pounds overweight, but she is fond of me and I took liberties with her. She is a darling.”
A fat person in a tight suit, unless it is perfectly new, should be interned.
In one chapter, Dr. Peters admits that while on her mission to Serbia (she refers to their location as Albania) with the other women doctors, she ate freely of the foods that were prepared for them, even though they were active and “the work was hard.” At the end, she discovered upon looking in a full-length mirror —
“Mon Dieu!” I exclaim. “Bogomi!” (Serbian — ‘For the love of Allah!’) “This is no mirror,” I mutter. “This is one of those musee things that make you look like a Tony Sarg picture of Irvin Cobb.”
I had no clue who Tony Sarg or Irvin Cobb were so I looked it up. Here’s what she was talking about:
One entire chapter in Peters’ book discusses eating a primarily plant-based diet, with only modest additions of protein. She even notes that people who eat mostly vegetarian diets seem not only to be slimmer than others, but can also perform better athletically.
Reading the book, it’s hard not to see that Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters was passionate about her topic. She knew that being extremely overweight was bad for health. It’s also clear that she tried her utmost to understand diet, nutrition, and its impact on health.
Everything is cast through the lens of “looking good,” however, and her approach to calorie counting and restriction, despite all of her relatively good nutritional advice, has carried through to the present day. Nearly every discussion of overweight revolves around it essentially being a moral failing — people who eat too much are greedy. People who don’t exercise enough are lazy. It’s the exact tone that has been dominant to the present day.
I found only one genuinely processed food on her recommended diet lists: Triscuit.
Triscuits were quite the fixture in my house when I was growing up. I never liked this snack cracker: it turns out it was first invented in 1900 by the “Shredded Wheat Company” with only three ingredients: wheat, oil, and salt.
Most of Peters’ menus and foods are simple: milk, fish, meat, vegetables, eggs. But she recommends 1,200 calorie diets, and the “recommended calories” for different people are standardized.
It’s fascinating that today, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters isn’t particularly well-known, nor is her book, the first best-selling diet book with millions of copies, much-discussed.
But just about everything she wrote, said, and did, still influences our lives over 100 years later, even if Dr. Peters’ eyes might have popped out of her head had she seen the unbelievable excess and proliferation of prepared foods, snack foods, frozen foods, and fast food/fast casual restaurants available today.
I do have a connection with Dr. Peters and this book: it did influence my upbringing. And her “calories in-calories out” dictum has influenced us one and all. Like many people in the past, she meant very well, but she was not only a product of her times, she did not have enough information to go on as she created her calorie charts and recommended meals and included her “small nephew’s” humorous stick figure pictures.
Irvin S. Cobb was well-known in the early 20th century for two separate careers. In one, he was a prolific author, primarily of whimsical humor; in the other, he was a Hollywood character actor who specialized in humorous roles.