Ancel Keys, creator of WWII K rations, dies at 100

WASHINGTON – Ancel Keys, a University of Minnesota public health scientist who invented the K rations consumed by millions of soldiers in World War II, discovered that saturated fat was a major cause of heart disease and championed the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, died Nov. 20 at his home in Minneapolis. He was 100.

No cause of death was reported, but in recent years, Keys had several strokes and broke a hip. He was still at work earlier this year, analyzing data from his landmark epidemiological study, begun in 1958, of 12,000 middle-aged men living in Italy, the Greek islands, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Finland, Japan and the United States.

That “Seven Countries Study” provided evidence that a diet rich in vegetables, fruit, pasta, bread and olive oil and sparing of meat, eggs, butter and dairy products reduces the occurrence of heart disease.

“He was a giant in the field of nutrition in a variety of ways,” said Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. “His studies held up in the big picture, yes. He missed some things that are important. Smoking and obesity didn’t show up. But the basic conclusion is … the vast majority of heart disease is preventable.”

A compact, driven man, Keys was not always the easiest colleague. A tribute, cited by The Washington Post two years ago, said he could be “frank to the point of blunt trauma, and critical to the point of razor slash.” His impatient behavior could be attributed, perhaps, to the fact that he accomplished so much in his long and extraordinarily varied career.

Born in Colorado Springs, he was the nephew of movie actor Lon Chaney. His family moved to San Francisco just before the devastating 1906 earthquake and fires. After the disaster, they moved across the bay to Berkeley, Calif., where he was identified as one of the 1,528 “gifted” children studied by Stanford University researcher Lewis Terman. Before Keys was out of his teens, he worked in a lumber camp, shoveled bat guano in an Arizona cave, mined for gold and sailed to China as a crewman aboard an ocean liner.

He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and briefly took a management trainee job at Woolworth’s but soon was back in school, earning a doctorate in biology from the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He had a postdoctoral fellowship in Copenhagen, earned a second doctorate in physiology from Kings College in Cambridge, England, and worked briefly at the Mayo Clinic. He joined the University of Minnesota in 1936 and four years later founded its famous Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene, housed under the bleachers at the university’s stadium.

He led a scientific excursion to the Andes in 1935 to study the physiological effects of altitude. It was that research, he believed, which led to an assignment from the U.S. government at the start of World War II: design a lightweight but nutritionally robust ration for paratroops. The K Ration, named for him, was originally made up of items from a Minneapolis grocery store — hard biscuits, dry sausage, hard candy and chocolate.

Keys, by then a special assistant to the secretary of war, did other nutrition research, and his study on the physiology of starvation, conducted in Minnesota on conscientious objectors, provided the most complete record of the physiological, psychological and cognitive changes that come from food deprivation.

In 1947, he noticed the increasing numbers of deaths due to heart attacks, as noted in the newspapers’ obituary pages, and began to study 283 businessmen from the Twin Cities, conducting examinations and taking blood samples every five years. It showed that smoking, high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol were frequently seen in men who had heart attacks. After a decade of work, he determined that saturated fat chiefly determined blood cholesterol levels, a breakthrough that stunned the meat-and-potatoes populace.

That work led him to create the Seven Countries Study, which is still considered one of the most rigorous and complicated epidemiological studies ever undertaken.

The insights, popularized in his bestseller “Eat Well and Stay Well,” which he wrote with his wife, landed Keys on the cover of Time magazine in 1961. The profits from that book and two similar ones allowed the family to buy a home in Italy, where they lived when they weren’t in Minnesota. He retired in 1972 from the university. He remained physically active for decades, walking, swimming and building stone walls.

Survivors include his wife, Margaret Keys, of Minneapolis; a daughter, Carrie D’Andrea of Bloomington, Minn.; a son, Dr. Henry Keys of Voorheesville, N.Y.; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Ever the rigorous scientist, Keys was asked at his 100th birthday party in January whether his diet had contributed to his long life. He answered, “Very likely, but no proof.”