Davis, Adelle (1904–1974)

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Davis, Adelle (1904–1974)

Pioneering and controversial American nutritionist who was an early proponent of a "health food" diet. Name variations: (pseudonym) Jane Dunlop. Born Daisie Adelle Davis on February 25, 1904, in Lizton, Indiana; died in California on May 31, 1974, of bone cancer; youngest of five children of Charles Eugene Davis and Harriet (McBroom) Davis; graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, 1927; University of Southern California, Master's in biochemistry, 1938; married George Edward Leisey, in 1946 (divorced 1953); married Frank V. Sieglinger, in 1960; children: (first marriage) two adopted, George Davis Leisey and Barbara Adelle Leisey.

Established a private nutritional counseling practice (1931); began publishing books calling for nutritional reform (1940s) and became the nation's leading advocate of the health benefits of foods grown without pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and extensive refining; became a leading figure in the growing "health food" movement, but her work came under increased scientific criticism, particularly her claims that most social ills were the direct result of poor nutrition (1960s); her lax methodology and the discovery of hundreds of errors in her books called her reputation into question, though she remained a popular media figure and continued to espouse her theories freely.

In 1942, as many of America's young were marching off to World War II, a slim volume on a subject about which the nation had little time to think appeared on the bookshelves of school libraries. Called Vitality Through Planned Nutrition, it urged readers to pay closer attention to the food they were eating. Written by a "consulting nutritionist" named Adelle Davis, the book claimed that scientifically planned nutrition could assure vitality and good health well past middle-age and warned against the blandishments of "food racketeers" who "sprinkle their vocabulary freely with scientific terms which are not understood by the untrained person." The book's author could hardly have imagined at the time that, 20 years later, the same charge would be made against her.

Daisie Adelle Davis had every right to consider herself among the well-trained. The youngest of five daughters born to Charles and Harriet Davis, on February 25, 1904, she was one of the relatively few women in the early part of the century who held degrees from two of the nation's leading universities, in "household science" and in biochemistry. Both were the result of a fascination with food that began in early childhood, and which she suspected had something to do with her mother's death when Davis was only 17 months old. "Maybe I wanted to make up for the good mother I never had, to become the good mother myself," she once said. She often claimed that the strict upbringing Charles Davis gave to his youngest daughter was because he had wanted a boy; she described her childhood as lonely and unhappy.

Americans are the most abundantly fed people in the world, but their diets are far from the best nutritionally.
—Adelle Davis

But there was always food, fresh from the fertile Indiana soil of the Davis farm. Adelle said she could cook before she could read and had to ask her sisters to recite aloud the recipes from the Fanny Farmer cookbook that was the unofficial bible of the Davis kitchen. Throughout her public schooling, Davis repeatedly won 4-H ribbons for her canning and baking skills and received her best grades in home economics, though she remembered the pain of these years just as well as the recognition. "I was round and roly-poly and I felt so alone," she once remembered. "I felt so hated inside." The first thing she did upon leaving home for Purdue University in 1923 was to drop the name her father had given her: Daisie. It reminded her, she said, of pigs and cows.

As if going off to college weren't bold enough for a young woman in the early 1920s, Davis distanced herself even further from her childhood memories by moving to California, where she continued her studies at the University of California at Berkeley and received her bachelor's degree in 1927. Then she crossed the country to New York, where she acquired more training in dietetics at New York City's Bellevue and Fordham hospitals before finding a job as the superintendent of nutrition for the Yonkers, New York, school system. Throughout her training, Davis became convinced that Americans weren't paying enough attention to their diets and were, in fact, making themselves sick by committing what she later called "slow murders in the kitchen." So convincing were her arguments that she was able to set up a successful nutritional counseling practice in Manhattan with several prominent obstetricians as clients.

By 1931, Davis had moved her counseling practice back to California and had begun studies at the University of Southern California that would lead to her master's degree in biochemistry in 1938. Her research further convinced her of the importance of scientific principles of nutrition, especially the value of Vitamin A in helping the body to resist disease. Her first published work, in fact, was a 1932 promotional brochure for a milk company that extolled the virtues of the high Vitamin A content of her client's product. Two more privately printed brochures followed, Optimal Health in 1935 and You Can Stay Well in 1939. But a Depression-ridden America was having a hard enough time finding sufficient food to go around, leaving Davis' theories and rallying cries for better nutrition largely unheeded. Vitality Through Planned Nutrition, published in 1942 while the nation's attention was focused on the war, contained an entire chapter devoted to Vitamin A in which Davis urged her readers to consume large doses of carotene-rich vegetables, drink at least a quart of milk a day, and take substantial quantities of supplements. "Massive doses of Vitamin A have caused no ill effects," she assured her public. "A group of babies fed 166,666 international units of carotene daily for five months suffered no ill effects," though she offered no attribution for the study to which she referred. Claiming that the body could easily store excess amounts of the nutrient and that what could not be stored was destroyed in the intestinal tract, Davis confidently asserted that "it seems wise to err on the side of taking too much rather than too little."

Postwar prosperity and its resulting "baby boom" meant America had more mouths to feed than ever. Agricultural scientists began to introduce the first of scores of newly synthesized chemical fertilizers and additives designed to boost production, but Adelle Davis saw danger ahead and once again took up her pen to write the first of her four "Let's" books, Let's Cook It Right, published in 1947. It was followed by Let's Have Healthy Children (1951), Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit (1954), and Let's Get Well (1965). The books, still in print, sold well over ten million copies in various revisions during Davis' lifetime; Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit alone went through 33 hardcover editions before a paperback version finally appeared in 1970. Throughout the series, Davis' sound warnings that chemicals and over-refining were destroying the nutritional value of America's food became increasingly strident. She called most cookbooks "treatises on how to produce diseases," claimed that "the whole country is at the mercy of people making money off our food," and urged Americans to eat unprocessed, unrefined foods that had been grown without chemical pesticides or additives.

A growing number of Americans were ready to listen. By the mid-1950s, the undercurrent of dissatisfaction with mainstream America's smug comforts began erupting in various forms, California being one of the most active breeding grounds for questioners of prevailing social values. Davis' call for returning to natural ways of eating and living fit neatly into these groups' beliefs. Her growing fame was not without its disadvantages, however, as her claims came under increasingly critical scrutiny from the scientific community of which she still considered herself a member. "In the early days, I'd get so discouraged I'd cry," she once recalled. "For years, people thought I was a kooky crank."

There were problems in her personal life, too. Although the initial stability of her first marriage to George Leisey in 1946 had marked the beginning of the "Let's" series, the marriage was foundering by the early 1950s. The adoption of two children, George Davis Leisey and Barbara Adelle Leisey , failed to help matters, and in 1953, the couple divorced. That same year, Davis began seven years of psychotherapy under three successive analysts, the first two male. "Then I realized I needed to have a good mother figure, too, so I found a woman," she remembered years later. "Believe me, it was the best money I ever spent." She said that her work with Jungian, Reichian, and Freudian techniques all showed that she had deep-seated fears of failure that she traced to her father's disappointment at not having a son. "A lot of us do things because of neurotic patterns," she said. "Unless you've had a lot of deep analysis you don't see that."

Despite the rigors and pain of her therapy, Davis kept up an active writing and lecturing schedule and accepted a growing number of patients at her nutritional counseling practice. One of them was a retired lawyer and accountant named Frank Sieglinger, who came to her for advice in 1958, the year she closed her practice under pressure from her growing popularity. The two were married in 1960, providing the anchor Davis felt she had been missing. "He wears well, my Frank does," she told an interviewer in 1971, after 11 years of marriage. "He says he doesn't have much to do with Adelle Davis, but he likes Mrs. Sieglinger just fine."

The 1960s marked the peak of Davis' fame as "the High Priestess of the new nutrition religion" as Time called her. But she steadfastly insisted that her theories were hardly a fad. "Up to fifty years ago," she said, "organic food was the only kind anybody knew of. Time was in this country that when you opened your mouth, you put in good food. That was when the real brains got developed—Washington, Jefferson, people like that. These days, we don't grow enough skulls to put a brain in anymore." Such pithy observations, coupled with her bright blue eyes, gray hair, and deep voice (she sang tenor in her church choir) made her a favorite with the media, for whom she was always willing to provide a pearl of natural-grown wisdom. Her "You are what you eat" entered the national lexicon, and she became even more of a cult figure when she admitted experimenting with LSD in the late 1950s, "when it was still legal," she was careful to point out. "It scared the bejesus out of me," she said, "but I learned so much!" (She recounted her experiences in 1961's Exploring Inner Space, written under the name Jane Dunlop.)

Davis continued to lose ground, however, with her medical colleagues. As the nation's "food guru" was adopted by nature movements, ashrams, communes, and other groups then considered on the American fringe, Davis' claims seemed to be more and more out of step with accepted medical knowledge. By the mid-1960s, she was asserting that such disparate misfortunes as impotence, alcoholism, drug addiction, along with a host of social ills—from high divorce rates and spiraling crime rates to economic upheavals and racial tensions—were the direct result of bad eating. In numerous revisions of her "Let's" books, she continued to recommend massive doses of vitamins A, D, and E, despite evidence of toxicity leading to some of the very diseases they were supposed to prevent. She claimed that epilepsy could be cured simply with treatments of large doses of magnesium; advised readers that potassium chloride, highly toxic in large doses, could cure kidney disorders; and warned that pasteurized milk was dangerous, especially for pregnant women who ran the risk, she said, of having their babies born with cataracts. Such statements enraged the mainstream medical profession and detracted from Davis' main message of good, sensible nutrition. "Let them call me anything they want," Davis responded. "I have facts to back up everything I say."

After a closer examination, Davis' critics disagreed. Dr. Russell Randall, who headed the Medical College of Virginia's Department of Renal Diseases in the late 1960s and early 1970s, took issue with her recommendation of potassium chloride as a treatment for nephrosis and baby's colic. "This could kill them," he said in print. "A person with bad kidney function taking her advice could have a cardiac arrest." Davis denied she had advised the use of such a dangerous chemical, but the edition of Let's Have Healthy Children used by a Florida couple to treat their two-month-old colicky son did, indeed, contain such advice. After several days of Davis' prescribed three grams a day, the baby died. Davis' publishers settled quietly out of court.

Another leading physician, Dr. Edward Rynearson, professor emeritus at the Mayo Clinic, also took Davis to task in print, charging that her books were "larded with inaccuracies, misquotations, and unsubstantiated statements" and speculated that the only reason her books were so popular was that Americans "loved hogwash." An analysis of one of her books, he said, turned up an average of one factual error per page, with scores of inaccuracies found in the references, and he called attention to permanent stunting of a young girl's growth after her parents claimed they had followed Davis' advice and given her massive doses of vitamin A. "I have squillions of references to research that indicates or proves my statements are true," Davis said. "Most physicians have not studied nutrition and there isn't one medical school in the United States that teaches nutrition seriously." Nonetheless, in 1969, the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health labelled her the single most harmful source of false information in the country; and, in 1972, the Chicago Nutrition Association placed three of her "Let's" books on its "not recommended" list. "Oh, these doctors with their mother problems!" Davis complained. "I guess they have to have someone to take it out on and I guess I'm as good as anyone."

Still, laudatory articles about her continued to appear in national publications, and she was relentlessly pursued by natural food restaurant chains, organic food producers, and vitamin makers to endorse their products—lucrative offers that she steadfastly refused, often citing religious grounds. "My church [The Church of Religious Science] believes that since you're part of God, you've got the power to function nobly, and therefore you'd better do it," she explained.

Her supporters said that Davis was the best proof of her theories' efficacy. In 1970, at age 66, she was playing tennis five days a week (singles, she stressed, because doubles didn't provide enough exercise), swimming every morning (naked, she recommended, which was better for the circulation), tending to the organic garden and orchards she and Frank had planted at their home in Palos Verdes Estates, California, and maintaining a heavy travel and lecture schedule. When a reporter from Look arrived to interview her, she whipped up an organic lunch of a fresh green salad, zucchini, cabbage cooked in milk, a filet of sole coated with powdered skim milk and wheat germ, and huge glasses of fresh, unpasteurized milk. "It was delicious," the reporter later wrote, "but on the way to the airport afterward I nearly exploded from the gas it produced." Davis recommended B vitamins and hydrochloric acid to help his digestion.

No one seemed more surprised than Davis when, in 1973, she shocked her millions of fans by announcing that she had been diagnosed with bone cancer, which she variously blamed on too many X-rays that had been taken for "insurance purposes" or on the processed foods she had eaten as a young woman, before her nutritional enlightenment. Reminded by a reporter of the statement in one of her books that she had never known a single adult who drank a quart of milk a day to develop cancer, she curtly replied, "Well, I was wrong," and stressed that her illness in no way disproved any of her nutritional beliefs. Certainly, although her health was weakened, her enthusiasm was not. "Frankly, I'd be very surprised if I died of cancer," she said. "I'm eating better than ever and my resistance is high." She admitted having undergone an operation for her disease earlier in the year but refused to say what self-prescribed regimen of vitamins and minerals she was following. "What's it anybody's business what I'm taking," she said, perhaps recalling the criticisms that still plagued her, "unless I have proof whether it will work?"

Because of the increasing discomfort caused by her cancer, Davis curtailed her lecture schedule but continued to make television appearances and grant interviews, looking her usual bright-eyed, grandmotherly self. But by the winter of 1974, the pain was too much even for Davis. She returned to her home for the last time and died on May 31, 1974, aged 70.

Although many of Davis' pronouncements are still in dispute, an equal number have since formed the basis for ongoing revelations of the delicate balance between body chemistry and good health that mark contemporary nutritional theory. Perhaps more important, Adelle Davis' remarkable resilience and determination in the face of challenges to her work and, ultimately, her very life, was exemplary. In one of her last interviews that determination was still very much in evidence. "Don't worry about me," she called out cheerily as the reporter was leaving. "I've had a good life, a rich life," she said, "and there's plenty more to go."