The Author, Richard Mackarness, was the doctor who ran Britain's first obesity and food allergy clinic. The book merges anecdotal observations from this clinic with a comprehensive review of all medical evidence throughout the world up to the mid-1970s. In the 1975 edition, this includes a historical analysis of diets from Harvey-Banting to Robert Atkins and Herman Taller, and features the work of Blake Donaldson, Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Alfred Pennington, who all promoted an Inuit-style meat-only diet. Mackarness extols the virtues of Pemmican, discusses food allergies, examines carbohydrate addiction and touches on related psychology.

Mackarness's philosophy has three main features:-

• A person's metabolism falls into one of two distinctive types, the constant-weight always-slim type, and the fatten-easily type.

• Weight gained by people in the latter group is due to an inability to break down carbohydrates fully because of a metabolic defect, and not as the public at large believe, because of weak-willed gluttony.

• Man's problems with obesity began 8,000 years ago, with the advent of cereal planting. For 4 million years before that, man was a hunter who survived by killing and eating meat, which has led to complete biological adaptation to a meat diet, but not to a cereal diet, because it is too recent.