03/08/2026
Interesting how the concepts about diet have really not evolved all that much. This book wasn’t science then or now, but science shows l
ow carb, low sugar, low starch and of course some fasting to heal your body is a very doable and manageable way to eat and live a healthy life!
The 1964 Low-Carb Book That Told Men to Eat Steak, Drink Martinis, and Skip Bread
A San Francisco publisher lost 50 pounds and lived to 98 following it.
In 1964, a strange little diet book started circulating among businessmen.
It wasn’t written by a doctor.
It was written by a San Francisco publisher and photographer named Robert Cameron.
The title alone sounded like a joke.
The Drinking Man’s Diet.
But the message inside it was serious.
Cameron had struggled with his weight for years.
Then he discovered something that would later become familiar to anyone studying metabolism.
Weight gain wasn’t just about calories.
It was about carbohydrates.
His solution was simple and, for the 1960s, almost scandalous.
Cut the carbs.
Keep the good food.
The diet recommended meals like:
Steak
Lobster
Eggs
Cheese
Salads
Martinis or wine
Bread, sugar, and starch were the things he told readers to avoid.
The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Executives loved it because it promised something unheard of at the time:
You could lose weight without giving up real food.
Cameron himself claimed to lose 50 pounds on the approach.
He kept eating that way for decades.
And he lived to 98 years old.
Long before keto.
Long before low-carb went mainstream.
A photographer from San Francisco was quietly telling people the same thing many metabolic researchers are rediscovering today.
For some people, the real weight problem was never steak.
It was the bread next to it.
Mike Collins
The SugarFreeMan
