Dr. Marcel Diennets adventure in the field of malnutrition started during the Biafran war in 1968, when he was with the International Red Cross.
Landing on a street in Biafra with a cargo plane filled with 3 tons of food and medication and with the commission to heal the isolated starving children suffering from Malnutrition and Kwashiorkor disease, Dr. Diennets party proceeded to feed them immediately. Within hours the children who had eaten began to die.
Overwhelmed with horror, the young men proceeded to perform the necessary task of autopsy on victims to ascertain the cause of death, regardless of the dangerous cultural implications that desecrating a body would cause in rural Africa. They discovered that when they compressed the liver and heart tissues in their hands, it turned to powder.
Dr. Diennet realized that starvation produced a hormonal imbalance which weakened these organs to the extent that food could not be metabolized.
Now, the Doctor saw the true nature of the problem:
He needed to correct the children’s hormonal imbalance before feeding them. So, they gave the children hormone boosting medicines. No more children died that day.
For the next three years Dr. Diennet continued to treat victims of malnutrition in the third world, and criminals in prison who were on hunger strikes. In 1971, Dr. Diennet volunteered to go to Vietnam with the US Army and with the help of many G.I.s built a 150-bed hospital for crippled orphans. The hospital is still in existence today and has grown to be one of the largest Children’s hospitals in Vietnam. When the Communists took over Saigon, they forced Dr. Diennet to leave and he returned to Paris.
In spite of his accomplishments with victims in the third world people and their horrific conditions, his peers refused to acknowledge his achievements and would not recognize him as a qualified doctor for white people.
Hurt by the loss of his hospital, rejected by his peers, and financially destitute, Dr. Diennets only option at this time was to open an office in Paris to prove his credibility.
Because there was no malnutrition in Paris, he decided to treat the disorder of obesity because he knew that the same rules would apply, in the reverse.