Lulu Hunt Peters

Lulu Hunt Peters (1873–1930) was an American physician and writer who wrote a featured newspaper column entitled Diet and Health, which she followed up with a best-selling book, Diet & Health: With Key to the Calories. She was the first person to widely popularize the concept of counting calories as a method of weight loss. It was also the first weight-loss book to become a bestseller.

Early life and education

Lulu E. Hunt was one of three children born to Thomas and Alice Hunt of Milford, Maine. She attended the Maine State Normal School in Castine before moving to California. She married Louis H. Peters in Los Angeles in 1899, and in 1909 graduated as a Doctor of Medicine from the University of California. At the time, less than 5% of medical students in the US were women.

Career

Peters was the first woman to intern at Los Angeles County General Hospital, and led its pathology lab before becoming Chair of the Los Angeles California Federation of Women’s Clubs' public health committee — a role that gave her “more power than the entire city health office” according to a contemporaneous account. She gave frequent lectures about public health and child nutrition.

Nineteenth century scientists had begun to quantify the energy in food in calories, and Wilbur O. Atwater had developed new methods in the area and published the first books giving calorie counts for foods. At the time, this quantification was mostly regarded as a way to identify foods with high energy content to combat malnutrition; Peters appears to have been the first person to have recognized that using this information to intentionally reducing calorie intake would lead to weight loss. After losing 70 pounds herself, Peters began zealously promoting the concept. For a number of years, Dr. Hunt wrote a featured newspaper column entitled "Diet and Health" for the Central Press Association, which supplied content for about 400 newspapers nationwide.