Common Diets in the Industrialized World That Are Unhealthy

In the early days of the 20th century a new science of nutrition was born. Vitamins were discovered, along with other properties in food that were now known to be essential for health.

Most nutritional studies were designed to find the dietary causes of deficiency diseases, such as scurvy and rickets. Most studies of this type were performed by feeding laboratory animals a diet that was known to be lacking in one nutrient or another (such as vitamin D or calcium) and then watching to see if the animals got sick.

While these studies were important to increase the understanding of nutrients in food, they could not be used to design an optimal diet, because the information they gathered from these studies was too limited.

A young medical doctor working for the British government in India named Sir Robert McCarrison then came up with a revolutionary idea. He began his research in 1914, studying the causes of goiter, a deficiency disease affecting the thyroid gland and a common condition in some parts of the Indian subcontinent.

The outbreak of World War I brought his research to a temporary halt, but he returned to India in 1918 and greatly expanded the nature of his research, using methods that were almost unheard of at the time. While most scientists were designing experiments like the ones described above, and attempting to induce disease in animals through deficient food mixtures, McCarrison looked at population groups as a whole, and their traditional diets as a whole.

This study allowed him to find the healthiest populations in India, and the least healthy, as well.

He then designed a number of animal experiments in which he fed separate populations of laboratory rats on the same foods eaten by the healthy and unhealthy groups of people. Not only were the types of food the same, but the foods were also prepared in the same way.

Rats were used because they naturally eat the same things that people do, and he believed that an exceptionally good human diet would produce super-healthy rats, and a poor human diet would produce sickly, week and diseased rats - just as it did in the human populations he studied.

The results of his studies were exactly what he expected - healthy, calm, and energetic rats in one colony that gave birth to well-formed, healthy baby rats.

And sick, irritable rats in another colony that was treated in exactly the same way as the healthy rats, except for the food they ate.

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