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How did I get interested in the weight problem?
The story begins in the summer after I graduated from high school. I got one of the best jobs I ever had—I worked as a timber cruiser in the Harvard forest in Petersham, Massachusetts. My friend Erik and I would hike around the woods with a compass, nail pieces of PVC pipe into the ground to mark a spot, and describe the different species of trees we saw—red maple, red oak, and the like. Petersham is a small town, so Ernie—a senior lecturer at Harvard—would drive us to the grocery in nearby Athol, and we would load up for the next two weeks.
I would head straight for the meat counter and buy 14 steaks. Every night I cooked a 16-ounce steak in a frying pan and spread butter across the top. It was the best of times.
Throughout college I didn’t just eat red meat, I was a carnivore. I ate only red meat. When I started Harvard Medical School they gave us an entrance physical where they checked some lab work. My serum cholesterol was 233. Back in those days the docs at the University Health Service didn’t always measure LDL cholesterol nor were they very concerned about “modest” elevations in cholesterol—this was all just beginning. The doctor did tell me my cholesterol was at the low end of the high range and that I might think about cutting back on red meat. “You might think about getting it a little lower,” he told me, “200–239 is what we call ‘borderline high’.”
Then, first semester of medical school, I took pathology, and they showed us a picture of an aorta—the giant artery coming out of the heart—destroyed by atherosclerotic plaque. I put two and two together and decided I had to change my ways. I read the literature. The guidelines in force at the time called cholesterol under 200 “normal” or “desirable”, with 200–239 being “borderline high” (that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?). How was 200 arrived at? “Normal” cholesterol was arbitrarily defined as values below the 50th percentile on the bell-shaped curve of the general population.5
 
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