Ancel Keys

Ancel Benjamin Keys (January 26, 1904 – November 20, 2004) was an American physiologist who studied the influence of diet on health. In particular, he hypothesized that replacing dietary saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced cardiovascular diseases. Modern dietary recommendations by health organizations, and national health agencies corroborate this.

Keys studied starvation in men and published The Biology of Human Starvation (1950), which remains the only source of its kind. He examined the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease and was responsible for two famous diets: K-rations, formulated as balanced meals for combat soldiers in World War II, and the Mediterranean diet, which he popularized with his wife Margaret.

Ancel Benjamin Keys was born in Colorado Springs on January 26, 1904, the son of Benjamin Pious Keys (1883–1961) and Carolyn Emma Chaney (1885–1960), the sister of actor and director Lon Chaney (1883–1930). In 1906 they moved to San Francisco before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck. Shortly after the disaster, his family relocated to Berkeley where he grew up. Keys was intelligent as a boy; Lewis Terman, a noted psychologist and inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test, described him as intellectually "gifted". During his youth, he left high school to pursue odd jobs, such as shoveling bat guano in Arizona, being a powder monkey in a Colorado mine, and working in a lumber camp. He eventually finished his secondary education and was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley in 1922.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Keys initially studied chemistry, but was dissatisfied and took some time off to work as an oiler aboard the American President Lines ship SS President Wilson, which traveled to China. He then returned to Berkeley, switched majors, and graduated with a B.A. in economics and political science (1925) and M.S. in zoology (1928).

For a brief time, he took up a job as a management trainee at Woolworth's, but returned to his studies at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla on a fellowship.

In 1930, he received his Ph.D. in oceanography and biology from UC Berkeley. He was then awarded a National Research Council fellowship that took him to Copenhagen, Denmark to study under August Krogh at the Zoophysiological Laboratory for two years. During his studies with Krogh, he studied fish physiology and contributed numerous papers on the subject.

Once his fellowship ended, he went to Cambridge but took some time off to teach at Harvard University, after which he returned to Cambridge and earned a second Ph.D. in physiology (1936).

While doing fish research at Scripps, Keys would use statistical regressions to estimate the weight of fish from their length, at that time a pioneering use of biostatistics. Once in Copenhagen (1931), he continued to study fish physiology and developed techniques for gill perfusion that provided evidence that fish regulated their sodium by controlling chloride excretion through their gills. He would also use this perfusion method to study the effects of adrenaline and vasopressin ("pitressin") on gill fluid flow and osmotic regulation in fishes. He also designed an improved Kjeldahl apparatus, which improved upon Krogh's earlier design, and allowed for more rapid determination of nitrogen content in biological samples. This would prove useful for activities as diverse as determining the protein content in grasshopper eggs and anemia in humans.