Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879–1962) was a Canadian-American Arctic explorer and anthropologist who lived among the Inuit for over a decade and adopted their meat-only diet. He was the first Western figure to publicly argue, on direct observational evidence, that humans can thrive on animal foods alone.

In January 1928 he and fellow Arctic explorer Karsten Anderson entered Bellevue Hospital in New York for a year-long meat-only diet under the supervision of Dr Eugene F. Du Bois and the Russell Sage Institute. The experiment was published across the scientific literature — clinical observations by Lieb in JAMA in 1929 and the detailed metabolic study by McClellan and Du Bois in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in 1930 — both concluding that the subjects remained in good health throughout. It remains the most-cited foundational study in the carnivore literature.