William Howard Hay

William Howard Hay (1866 to 1940) was an American physician who directed the East Aurora Sun and Diet Sanatorium and is principally known for the Hay diet, a food-combining dietary system. He graduated from the New York University Medical College in 1891, practised in Youngsville, Pennsylvania, and served as surgeon to a tinplate company. After an episode of acute heart failure in 1905 and a diagnosis of Brights disease with a dilated heart, he changed his own diet and over the next four years developed a system based on fasting and on the idea that foods needing acid digestion and foods needing alkaline digestion must not be eaten at the same time. The diet was popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and followers included Henry Ford. The Journal of the American Medical Association criticised him as a food faddist, including for advising a patient with type 1 diabetes to stop taking insulin, and the physician Logan Clendening called the diet a half-baked unscientific food fad.