Lulu Hunt Peters

And that's really the big problem.

Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters back, you know, right around the nineteen twenties, thirties, forties, right? Somewhere in that timeframe, she published one of the biggest bestselling nutrition books of the time, and it was focused on calories.

There was this newly discovered thing or article to hang our nutrition, our choices on, but that's not that calories hadn't been around.

You know, there's Atwater, there's people before this, but calories were used not in nutrition.

It actually started way back during World War I.

A doctor named Lulu Hunt-Peters put out a book that was called Diet and Health with Key to the Calories.

And she was, I believe, one of, if not the first woman in America to, I believe, earn a medical degree.

And her newspaper column at the time ran in like hundreds of newspapers.

So a fun fact, and I want to get this right, so I'm going to read it.

In 1918, Dr. Lulu Hunt-Peters published the best-selling book, Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories, which is widely considered the first major popular diet book centered on calorie counting.

She encouraged readers to think of food primarily in terms of calories and to eat below their energy needs for weight loss.

I love the

but i do think i i really do think there's some value in everybody going through a phase of tracking their food so okay thinking back let's go backwards so let's see calories I think weren't even like discovered really or talked about until like 1890 I believe and that was mostly in like a lab sense like in a science lab and I think then there were only calorie counts or estimates on about 500 different foods which was you know that's probably every food in 1890 I don't know but only about 500 foods and then people didn't actually start tracking calories until I want to say somewhere around 1910 or 1913, something like that.

And it was because this woman, Lulu Peters, I believe was her name.

She wrote a book and I can't remember what it was called.

It had kind of a funny name, but basically she wrote a book instructing people how to eat fewer than 1200 calories.

I'm like, surely there I don't believe there there was an obesity epidemic back then and like people were starving and they're like

yeah

dragging their galleries or whatever but I think that probably more speaks to like the societal like standards that have been set for women probably considering that there was a woman that wrote this like already back then when you know people were just struggling to survive that that was still something that you know people were were focused on on doing and the food label thing in 1994, I didn't know that either.

I'm sure I learned that at some point during like one of my, you know, nutrition courses.