A Global Journey – Ancel Keys,the FAO,and the Rise of Transnational Heart Disease Epidemiology, 1949–1958

Few people have influenced western eating patterns in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as much as physiologist and epidemiologist Ancel Keys (1904–2004). Keys not only developed the K Ration for the United States military, but also advocated for diets that lowered blood cholesterol and famously discovered the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet in the 1950s and 1960s. Keys’ interest in the Mediterranean diet arose from his service on the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)-World Health Organization (WHO) Joint Expert Committee on Nutrition, which allowed him to explore nutritional status, dietary habits, and regional eating patterns across the globe. This paper examines how Keys’ service as chair of the UN FAO Committee on Caloric Requirements and the UN FAO Expert Committee on Nutrition led him to think globally about the relationship between diet and cardiovascular health, and to launch the first international comparative epidemiological study of diet and heart disease, the Seven Countries Study.     

Ratzel, the French School and the birth of Alternative Geopolitics

Modern French political geography began as a response to Ratzel's Politische Geographie and then became an attempt to place ratzelian ideas into the context of French geographical thought. What then emerged was a political geography which was set firmly in opposition to German geopolitics. There were some geographers who felt that a more effective response could be made by developing an indigenous French geopolitics. This can be seen as being the origin of the alternative geopolitics which was favoured by some American geographers during and after World War II and which subsequently became an important underlying theme in the new geopolitics which arose in the 1970s. The concept of an alternative geopolitics has owed a great deal to the French school of geography and has it roots in the original response of Vidal de la Blache to Ratzel.