Rice diet

The Rice Diet started as a radical treatment for malignant hypertension before the advent of antihypertensive drugs; the original diet included strict dietary restriction and hospitalization for monitoring. Some contemporary versions have been greatly relaxed, and have been described as fad diets.

Origin and original form

The Rice Diet Program was founded in 1939 by Dr. Walter Kempner, a refugee from the Nazis, who was at that time associated with Duke University. Kempner had many patients with malignant hypertension with kidney failure, and there were no good treatments for those patients. He believed that the kidney had two functions, one excretory and the other metabolic, and "he theorized that if the protein and electrolyte load on the kidney was reduced to a minimum, the kidney might better perform its more essential metabolic role. The details of his reasoning are obscure, but he began to treat patients with malignant hypertension with a diet composed of nothing but rice and fruit, and amazingly, they rapidly improved."

Kempner's implementation was very strict, but also careful - patients were hospitalized for several weeks at the beginning of treatment. The initial treatment was stopping all medication and putting the patient on a diet consisting of "white rice, sugar, fruit, fruit juices, vitamins and iron, and provided about 2000 calories, 20 grams of protein, and 700–1000 ml of liquid as fruit and fruit juices. Sodium content was extremely low, about 250 milligrams per day, and chloride content about 100 milligrams per day." If results were good, after several months small amounts of lean meat and vegetables were added to the diet.

Kempner obtained remarkable results, and he was invited to present them at a meeting of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1946. His presentation survives and "presents clear and unambiguous evidence, including blood pressure charts, retinal photographs, chest radiographs, electrocardiograms and laboratory results, documenting the benefits of his diet."

Kempner described his diet as "a monotonous and tasteless diet which would never become popular.... Kempner's only defense of its use was the fact that “it works,” and that the diet was preferable to the alternative of certain death"

Contemporary forms

Kempner retired from the Duke Faculty in 1974, but consulted until 1992. The commercialization of drugs to treat hypertension reduced both demand for the program and the need to make it strict in order to prevent death. In 2002 the program became independent of Duke University, and in 2013 the Rice House Healthcare Program opened in Durham, North Carolina. The Rice House Healthcare Program is an inpatient facility where people are put on a diet akin to the original diet and are monitored.

The rice diet has also been popularized in a softened form through several books; this version of the diet has been categorized as a fad diet with possible disadvantages including a boring food choice, flatulence, and the risk of feeling too hungry.

Further reading

• The Rice Diet Solution at WebMD
• The RICE Diet Report, Judy Moscovitz (1988)
• Heal Your Heart, The New Rice Diet Program, Kitty Gurkin Rosati (1996)
• The Rice Diet Cookbook, Kitty Gurkin Rosati (2007)

External links

• The Rice House Healthcare Program home page