In 1975, a Seattle gut doctor published a book arguing that human beings are carnivores built along the lines of a dog.
He could not possibly have chosen a worse year to say it.
His name is Walter Voegtlin, a gastroenterologist by trade, and his book is called The Stone Age Diet. Its central argument is anatomical, and to the profession of the day, it is rank heresy.
The human digestive tract, Voegtlin argues, is short and simple, built far more like a meat-eater's than a plant-eater's, closer in its basic design to the gut of a dog than to the long fermenting apparatus of a cow.
From this, he draws his conclusion. That we are adapted, by two million years of hunting, to a diet of meat and fat, and not to the mountain of grain that settled agriculture dropped on the species a mere ten thousand years ago.
He claimed, from his own clinic, that the meat-heavy regimen cleared up exactly the complaints his patients came to him with, the irritable colon and the chronic digestive misery, by removing the fermenting plant matter he believed was causing them.
He was, in effect, laying the foundation stone of the whole edifice that a later generation would market as paleo. And he was laying it years before anyone made the idea fashionable or profitable.
And he published it in 1975, of all the years available to him.
Straight into the teeth of the exact moment the United States government was preparing to swing the entire nation the other way, toward the low-fat, grain-forward advice that would define nutrition for the rest of the century.
His book limped out on a vanity press that made him pay for his own printing. It was barely distributed. It appeared only months before he died. And it sank without a ripple while the official machine thundered past in the opposite direction.
The anatomical argument at its heart kept resurfacing anyway, decade after decade, no matter how firmly it was pushed back under.
A doctor argued, from the plain shape of the human intestine, that we were built to eat meat.
He committed it to print in the one single year the establishment had decided, with total and lasting confidence, that we were built instead to eat wheat.