The Lady Doctor Who Is The Reason We Count Calories Today
Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters was a best-selling diet doctor 100 years ago …
I started wondering, “When did food calorie counting start, and what is the origin of dieting through calorie restrictions?”
I learned that the concept of the calorie as it relates to food, not combustion, was popularized in the U.S. by an agricultural chemist, Wilbur O. Atwater, between the 1880s and his death in 1907. Atwater’s work bore a close relationship to Frederick Taylor’s, the engineer whose time-motion studies introduced the concept of efficiency and job “productivity” among factory workers, and whose “work” influenced the way corporations treat workers to this day. Both men were trying to systematize and analyze different human activities with an eye toward greater efficiency or profit.
Here’s what Atwater, who advocated thriftiness among individuals — and who said of poor people, “the destruction of the poor is their improvidence” — looked like:
Wilbur O. Atwater wasn’t counting calories … or was he?
