Culture  /  Profile

American Women's Obsession With Being Thin Began With This 'Scientist'

Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were hooked on his diet.
Patrick Riviere/Getty Images

Bengamin Gayelord Hauser wasn’t the first diet guru to worm his way into Western women’s collective consciousness. The dieting advice of William Banting, an English undertaker turned anti-fat crusader, was so influential in Victorian-era London that his surname became a verb, synonymous with dieting (i.e., “I’m banting”). Hauser also wasn’t the first to count celebrities among his followers. John D. Rockefeller and Franz Kafka were both devoted “Fletcherites,” convinced that chewing a mouthful of food 100 to 700 times resulted in improved health and a slimmer body shape, while Henry Ford was a Hay man (à la Dr. William Hay) who never ate starch and protein at the same meal.

What Hauser managed to do that Banting, Fletcher, and Hay couldn’t was capitalize on the fears and desires of women in postwar America. Unlike women of previous generations, those in the first half of the 20th century had fewer children, better health, longer lives, and more disposable income. Middle age, in particular, no longer meant retreating into a housecoat and waiting to die. Now women “could afford to have a new sense of optimism about what life over fifty could be,” writes Catherine Carstairs in her 2014 article for the journal Gender & History, “‘Look Younger, Live Longer’: Ageing Beautifully with Gayelord Hauser in America, 1920–1975.”

Hauser’s approach to diet and nutrition emphasized that living a healthful life meant travel and dancing and enjoying small pleasures. He gave women of a certain age permission not just to exist publicly but to be the center of attention. To be in the spotlight, though, was a privilege that only those who were beautiful and slim and took special care to adhere to a healthy diet deserved. “There is real tragedy in fat,” Hauser wrote in 1939’s Eat and Grow Beautiful.

How to get and stay slim? Hauser came up with a number of approaches in the 50 years of his career, including juicing, eating according to one’s “type” (potassium, phosphorus, calcium, and sulphur), avoiding white bread, sugars and over-refined cereals, and preparing “healthful” recipes like the “pep breakfast”: two raw eggs beaten in orange juice to create, as he writes in his most famous book, Look Younger, Live Longer (1951), a “creamy drink fit for a King’s table.” Most important of all, don’t skimp on the “wonder foods,” advocated Hauser, including yogurt, powdered skim milk, brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, and blackstrap molasses.