In 1958 a British doctor handed the nation the reason it was getting fat. It thanked him by forgetting he existed.
His name was Richard Mackarness, and before medicine he trained as a painter, studying under Mervyn Peake, the man who wrote Gormenghast. Then he changed course, qualified, and wrote a book with a title that still reads like a dare.
Eat Fat and Grow Slim.
The subtitle was cheekier still: Banting Up to Date, a nod to the Victorian undertaker who had cured his own obesity on meat and fat a century earlier and been ignored for it. Mackarness was picking up a thread the establishment had spent decades pretending not to see.
His claim was simple and, to the dieticians of the day, outrageous. The thing fattening Britain was the carbohydrate, the bread and sugar and refined flour that humans had eaten in real quantity for only the thinnest sliver of their existence. Fat was close to innocent. He called the alternative the Stone Age diet: two million years as hunters, a few thousand as farmers, and a body that never got the memo about the switch.
He was also writing on borrowed time, in the last years before the official war on fat: before the advice that swept dripping and butter from British kitchens and poured in margarine and industrial seed oils. He defended animal fat at the exact moment the establishment was lining up to condemn it.
He had met the men doing this work too, crossing to America in 1958 to sit with the doctors he called the anti-cereal doctors, Donaldson among them, comparing patients who were losing weight while eating like lords.
Then he pushed past weight altogether. As a psychiatrist at Park Prewett in Basingstoke he set up one of the first food allergy clinics the NHS had seen, and suggested something properly heretical: that some of the depression and fog filling his waiting room came straight off the dinner plate. He wrote it up in 1976 as Not All in the Mind, a title aimed at every colleague who had ever told a patient it was all in theirs.
The verdict was a polite, immovable no. Not accepted, not adopted, filed under eccentric, while the nation was told to eat its wholemeal toast and fear the butter.
The book sold anyway. People tried it, felt the difference, and never quite worked out why their doctor looked pained when they mentioned it.
Mackarness died in 1996. The thing he was mocked for, that refined carbohydrate rather than fat sits behind much of modern metabolic disease, is creeping back into respectable conversation as though no one had said it first.
Somebody did. He trained as a painter, and he saw the picture fifty years before the rest of the room.