In 1930 two American doctors, Newburgh and Johnson, of the University of Michigan, suggested in one of their papers that "obesity results from a diet too high in calories, rather than from any metabolic deficiency". Their study on energy balance was based on very limited data and, above all, had been conducted over too short a period to deserve serious scientific acceptance. This did not prevent their study from being immediately and widely acclaimed as irrefutable scientific truth, and it has been treated as " gospel" ever since.
A few years later, however, Newburgh and Johnson, concerned at the publicity which had been given to their discovery, somewhat hesitantly published some serious reservations they had concerning their previous findings. These went entirely unnoticed. Their initial theory was already integrated into the syllabus of most Western medical schools, and there it remains to this day.
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