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[–]Richy_T 62 points63 points  (12 children)

This was known a long time ago. I was in a consignment type store once and picked up a book called "Eat fat, get thin". Giving it a quick scan through, it was basically the same stuff as Atkins but this book was from the 50s or 60s. I wish I'd have bought it. I think I found a reference to it once online but it's been drowned out since someone else released a book with the same name (and it wasn't Barry Groves either).

[–]gwern 56 points57 points  (10 children)

You mean Richard Mackarness's 1958 Eat Fat and Grow Slim?

[–]Richy_T 34 points35 points  (9 children)

That's the one. Thanks!

Edit: I found a pdf here.

https://www.ultimatehealthprotocol.com/support-files/eat_fat.pdf

It even references back to someone else expounding a high-fat, high protein diet in 1950. And of course, there's Banting's success in 1862.

[–]gwern 21 points22 points  (8 children)

FWIW, all I did was plug "Eat Fat" and set a date range "1950-1970" into a library search engine.

[–]khdbdcm 6 points7 points  (2 children)

/r/tipofmytongue is just people putting their google fu into practice.

[–]SuicideBomberEyelash 7 points8 points  (1 child)

And r/tipofmypenis is, well...

[–]PM_ME_SPICY_DECKS 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For practicing with bing of course

[–]Richy_T 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Ah, nice. I was relying on my google-fu too much. It let me down. It didn't help I had the name wrong. I'll add that to my tool-belt.

[–]gwern 1 point2 points  (3 children)

It didn't help I had the name wrong.

Yes, 'Eat Fat, Get Thin' doesn't work. People tend to remember the beginning of titles better than the end and oversimplify things*, and the title didn't sound quite right for the era: a little too punchy and abbreviated, and 'thin' wasn't as popular a word then (it has more of the connotations of 'scrawny' as opposed to 'sleek' or 'slim', hence branding like the 1977 Slimfast). So I dropped it to 'Eat Fat' and that worked fine.

* a good heuristic if you are ever tracking down quotes: a longer, more complex, harder-to-remember version of a quote is usually closer to the original.

[–]Richy_T 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I'm not sure if that would have helped with google though. The algorithm is flooded by other, newer books with those words in the title. By going to library search, you pretty well eliminated duplication of results and a whole lot of irrelevant non-book related results which allowed your reduced search to succeed.

I did try an amazon search too. It looks like the reduced search would have worked there but I didn't try it.

[–]gwern 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I'm not sure if that would have helped with google though.

For Google you would need to use additional keywords to hint the date range (Google does have date-based searching but only in terms of when something was added to the Internet). But it's very easy to find anyway. Literally the first Google search I did just now, '"Eat Fat" 1950s', has it as the first hit and '"Eat Fat" 1960s' has it as the third hit so whichever decade you try as a keyword, it works. EDIT: it actually even works if you drop the quotes as long as you exclude Hyman with -Hyman, although you have to go through the first 20 hits to find it among the more generic non-book hits.

[–]Richy_T -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Cool. I did add the 1950s but that was with the full title. Then I outsourced it ;)

[–]Spicydaisy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There’s also one from the 1950s called The Drinking Mans Diet which promotes a HFLC diet to stay slim. I️ think it’s been re-released.