The George Burr Diet
Essential Fatty Acid Deficiency Considered Beneficial
[Thanks to u/texugodumel of r/saturatedfat for showing me this]
George Burr, discoverer of the essential fatty acids, attempted to induce an essential fatty acid deficiency in one of his colleagues by feeding him an entirely fat free diet.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316623130215
http://sci-hub.yt/10.1093/jn/16.6.511
He totally failed, in fact the guy felt better.
All fatigue disappeared, even the usual feeling of being tired after a long day at work, and his lifelong migraines stopped. His high blood pressure (140-150/95-100) got steadily better over the first four or five months and then held steady at 130/85-88. And he lost weight, 69.1kg to 62.7kg over the first three months and then it stabilized there. His basal metabolic rate got higher, although I don't understand their units. They say -9/-12% to -2%, so presumably that's normalising toward some standard they had.
And he ended up being able to achieve a respiratory quotient of 1.14 when they gave him a bucket of 'sugar-milk', which is frankly difficult to believe and makes me doubt their measurements1. But they say that under more normal circumstances they got 0.99 and 0.97, which is bang right for almost pure sugar metabolism, so I do wonder. And they also imply that they have seen the same in rats.
They gave up after six months. His blood pressure went back up, but his migraines never came back.
They don't say why they gave up. I imagine six months of perfectly ghastly food just broke him before he managed to get an EFA deficiency, or possibly that he was on the verge of EFA deficiency and so started craving some EFAs to eat and that broke him.
This is 1938.
I can believe that the heroic experimental subject had managed to accumulate a little too much of the essential fatty acids in his body, perhaps as a result of seed-oil animal feed becoming high-PUFA animal fat becoming high-PUFA food around that time.
And that the attempt to induce an efa deficiency ended up fixing an efa excess instead.
But of course I think that. I'm an anti-seed oilz loony.
Still, fascinating experiment, full of clues. People back then were brave and curious and did real experiments that told them interesting things. And then wrote them up in ways that didn’t make the reader want to chew their own fingers off with boredom and irritation while trying to work out what they actually did and why.
Why the hell has no-one since ever tried this? If I had bloody migraines I'd be prepared to try it myself.
I hear rumours that the intrepid dieter was William Redman Brown, PhD, an Englishman who moved to Canada, fought in the first war, and eventually moved to Minnesota to become a biologist. But I can’t find out anything else about him. I tried to find a photo of him for this essay but I can't. Even George Burr doesn’t have a wikipedia page, although I did find a photo of him. A real shame. Such men should not be forgotten.
It’s possible if you’re turning carbs into fat at the same time as burning them, but I don’t think it’s normal!