Where's the Beef?

What about a link to a high-res photo? It looks from here like it's an illustration of caloric value, not recommended diet. If that's the case, I imagine there are strikingly similar visualizations in today's dietician textbooks.

If one zooms in on the text most of the text is barely legible. 'amenity' is right. This is not too far off the mark of what today's dietician might work with today. This is the text that I was able to read:

"The heat given off by food is used in maintaining the body temperature and supplying energy to the muscles. For this work the average daily requirement is around 3,000 Calories, and then since a pound of butter will produce 3,600 Calories, any one of the food quantities shown in this chart would more than supply all the daily heat and energy needs of most people. The quantities, however, are only approximate and will vary according to the weight and fat content of the particular …, chop, cantaloupe, or bunch of celery, etc, you may happy to buy. The amount of fat in food is what largely … in heating power, since, when burned in the body, one gram of fat will produce more than twice as much heat (3.3 Calories) as one gram of either protein or carbohydrate (??? Calories). Today Calories are considered a crude guide to diet simply because the heating power of food often has little to do with its nourishing power."

The text above the illustration reads as follows:

DIET'S SIDE SHOW: THE CALORIE

The heat given off by food is used in maintaining the body temperature and supplying energy to the muscles. For this work the average daily requirement is around 3,000 Calories, and thus, since a pound of butter will produce 3,600 Calories, any one of the food quantities shown in this chart would more than supply all the daily heat and energy needs of most people. The quantities, however, are only approximate and will vary according to the weight and fat content of the particular tomato, chop, cantaloupe, or bunch of celery, etc, you may happen to buy. The amount of fat in food is what largely determines its heating power, since, when burned in the body, one gram of fat will produce more than twice as much heat (9.3 Calories) as one gram of either protein or carbohydrate (4.1 Calories). Today Calories are considered a crude guide to diet simply because the heating power of food often has little to do with its nourishing power.

It's amazing the sort of junk that people have said over the years about health. It's only looking back that we realize how stupid it is to say that smoking is healthy but that's really what they thought back then.
-Lauren