Reddit mentions of Trick and Treat: how healthy eating is making us ill

I've read it in various books, and I specifically remember reading about his weight loss on a low fat diet in this book. If you do some quick googling you will find that he ate a mediterranean style diet for most of his life and he also lived to be 100 on his diet. Here are some details from his retirement. Disclaimer: I am not saying his diet would make everyone live to be 100, I'm simply stating the facts. The diet he ate works for some people, just like keto works for some people. No diet works for every human. As you can see, he ate some processed carbs, however he also ate nutrient dense foods like liver, sardines, veggies, fruits, etc. Some of those foods are even high in saturated fat. In fact it is estimated that his actual diet probably wouldn't fit within the current US guidelines, which is pretty ironic.

>Here's how my friend described Keys' retirement:
Ancel Keys was 155 pounds and 5' 71/2" with a BMI of 23.9--a tad on the heavy side, but certainly not overweight. He left academia at the age of 68 in 1972 and retired to a small seaside village south of Naples Italy in the area where he first discovered the lack of heart disease and the Mediterranean Diet--in the southern Italian population.
He and his wife Magaret built a seaside villa there from the royalties that they got from their three diet books.
Here are their typical meals:
Breakfast: 1/2 grapefruit, dry cereal with skim milk (2% fat), unbuttered toast, jam & coffee
Lunch : sardine sandwich, olives, cookies and a glass of skim milk -- always brown bagged when he was working; he followed lunch with a 10-minute doze.
Dinner: 2 hours with classical music & candlelight, multiple courses, a pre-dinner cocktail (a martini or negroni -- (¼ gin, ¼ Campari bitters, ¼ sweet or dry vermouth, ¼ soda water, over ice in an old-fashioned glass)), 1,000 calorie meal with less than 20% fat.
Sample menu: Turkey broth with noodles, veal scallopini a la Marsala, green beans, tossed salad dressed with tarragon vinegar and corn oil, homemade bread, cookies, expresso, fruit. They would have meat no more than 3X a week in the form of a "carving roast"-steaks, chops or roast.
This was a much more moderate diet than I would have expected, but it still generated the right results in the end for both of the Keys. They were getting a daily dose of alcohol from their cocktails and their "a la Marsala" cooking style. Keys did like his cookies. Ancel died at age 100 in 2004. His wife Magaret died at age 97 in 2006.
His diet recommendations are fairly simple: "Eat less fat meat, fewer eggs and dairy products. Spend more time on fish, chicken, calves' liver(?), Canadian bacon, Italian food, Chinese food, supplemented by fresh fruits, vegetables and casseroles."
Adds Keys: "Nobody wants to live on mush. But reasonably low-fat diets can provide infinite variety and aesthetic satisfaction for the most fastidious—if not the most gluttonous—among us." On such fare, Keys-the gourmet-keeps his own weight at a moderate 155, his cholesterol count at a comfortable 209.
Some glaring diet contradictions, perhaps?: Keys recommended calf livers (high in saturated fats and cholesterol) as well as Canadian bacon. These recommendations seem to contradict his research. I guess both Keys & his wife must have really liked liver and Canadian bacon--and yes, he could definitely be described as a "foodie". He also had a cholesterol level of 209, in spite of the fact that he knew that other populations with low heart disease had much lower levels. This high of a cholesterol level would suggest that his diet was not as perfect as what he was recommending.