Thomas L. Cleave

Thomas Latimer Cleave, known as Peter to friends and colleagues, was an English naval surgeon who lived from 1906 to 1983 and who is remembered for his work on diet and disease. Born in Exeter and educated at Clifton College, he trained at the Bristol Royal Infirmary and at St Mary's Hospital in London, qualifying at twenty-one after passing his primary FRCS examination at eighteen. He entered the Royal Navy in 1927 as a Surgeon Lieutenant and rose to surgeon captain. Influenced by Charles Darwin's writings and by his Bristol teacher Rendle Short, he came to hold that the human body is poorly adapted to the diet of modern Western people. He focused on preventive medicine and argued that refined carbohydrates, chiefly sugar and white flour, are the most transformed and therefore most dangerous foods, grouping their harmful effects under the name the Saccharine Disease.