Herbert Leon Newbold

Dr. H. L. Newbold was the first place I encounter the idea of an all-meat diet. He published a number of books throughout his career, but his last one The Type A / Type B Weight Loss Book published in 1991 is by far his best overall book on diet. It represents the culmination of everything he had learned about health and nutrition up to that point in time. He practiced orthomolecular medicine and was a colleague of Linus Pauling, as well as Dr. Robert Atkins. He also worked with and was greatly influenced by Dr. Theron Randolph whose work is described in his excellent book An Alternative Approach to Allergies.

Dr. Newbold’s private practice was located in New York City. His untimely death in 1993 at the age of 72 was apparently caused by an anaphylactic reaction to an antibiotic he received in the hospital while being treated for some type of infection. I have no idea what happened to his patient’s medical records, but I would love to get my hands on them. He presents some fascinating case histories in the above mentioned book, and I imagine he had many more like them that could not be included in that small volume.

Dr. Newbold worked extensively with people who suffered with obesity and eating disorders. He found that many of his patients were able to lose weight and stop destructive eating behavior if they ate an all-meat diet comprised almost entirely of beef. He allowed other meats as well, but – over the years – he discovered that the majority of his patients thrived on fatty ribeye steaks. Unlike Atkins, he does not single out the macronutrient carbohydrate as being the main culprit in his patients’ eating and weight problem.

Rather, Dr. Newbold takes a step back and points to what he called “new foods” in the human diet, i.e. foods such as grains and sugar as well as dairy and eggs. He felt that some people were genetically less well-equipped to handle these kinds of foods. Yes, many of these foods were high in carbohydrates, but he felt that the bigger issue was that people could become allergic to them. He explains that when a person is allergic to a food, it not only becomes addictive, but it also causes weight gain by interfering with proper hunger signaling and causing the allergic person to develop disordered eating.