Doctor Calvin Ezrin based diet advice on science – The Globe and Mail

A lot of folks apparently still needed to hear this: Eating that slice of chocolate cake feels good not because it satisfies your gut but because it creates a surge of serotonin, a chemical in your brain that regulates well-being and pleasure. The chemical spike is temporary; the calories, however, can have serious and lasting effects.

Also, getting a better night’s sleep can help you lose weight.

These simple principles were the cornerstones of Dr. Calvin Ezrin’s thriving medical practice in the treatment of obesity and other endocrine disorders. Over a career that spanned nearly 65 years, he helped thousands of Canadians and Americans lose weight, keep it off and gain control over their lives. He retired only a year ago, well into his 80s.

Beyond his success at treating obesity (and anorexia), Dr. Ezrin was at the forefront of research into the thyroid and pituitary glands, the latter described as the body’s master gland that controls many endocrine functions.

He died in Los Angeles on Oct. 4, three days after his 89th birthday.

Recalled as an old-school physician who got to know his patients and a rigorous teacher with a formidable intellect, he also had a cool side: He played the upright bass professionally, including a lengthy stint in Canadian composer Bobby Gimby’s band (though not on Mr. Gimby’s centennial-year singalong recording of Ca-na-da).

“He was indeed an amazing teacher and he mastered the art of bedside teaching,” said Toronto endocrinologist and professor of medicine Bernard Zinman, who studied under Dr. Ezrin. Dr. Zinman recalled that Dr. Ezrin employed an unusual teaching technique: Instead of grilling young residents as they gathered around a patient, he would arrange the students in a circle and then interview the patient. “These sessions were unique and had a lasting impression on both the trainees and the patient,” Dr. Zinman said.

After moving from Toronto to Southern California in 1976 to be closer to his wife’s family, Dr. Ezrin established the Ezrin Metabolic Center to treat obesity. Riding the wave of the weight-loss craze, he co-authored three books largely free of fad and heavy with scientific evidence: The Endocrine Control Diet (1990), which advanced a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that controlled fat intake, thus decreasing the secretion of insulin; The Type II Diabetes Diet Book (1995), which likewise touted low-carb, low-caloric intake to tamp down insulin production; and Your Fat Can Make You Thin (2001), which explained how to regulate the body’s serotonin levels to convert fat to fuel.

“He predated the Atkins diet,” said his eldest child, Bob Ezrin, the legendary music producer known for his work with Alice Cooper, Kiss, Pink Floyd, Taylor Swift and many others. “But he was a lousy businessman. He never figured out how to parlay it. In a way, he was an artist. He dreamed up artful ways to approach medical problems.”

Dr. Ezrin was born Oct. 1, 1926, in Toronto’s immigrant Jewish neighbourhood to William Ezrin and Edith Sloteroff, both of whom had fled Russia. William was in the fur business and later ran a small smoke shop at the corner of Queen Street and Spadina Avenue. The couple’s three children lived out the immigrant family’s dream: son Sydney became a lawyer while Calvin and his sister, Roslyn, became doctors.

Calvin Ezrin married his high school sweetheart, Geraldine Messenger, at age 19. He graduated at the top of his class from the University of Toronto’s medical school in 1949, at 22, within the quota for Jewish students. He later became the first Jewish staff physician at Toronto General Hospital’s department of medicine.

Dr. Ezrin supported himself by playing the upright bass in bands that worked weddings and bar mitzvahs and played at summer resorts. He performed with Mr. Gimby’s band for about a decade, sometimes riding the band bus back to Toronto at 2 or 3 a.m. and getting up a few hours later to go to class. Meantime, he trained with Dr. Charles Best, who had co-discovered insulin in 1922.

His first job was treating diabetes in children. Like many other practitioners, Dr. Ezrin noticed differences in the disease in young people, who needed insulin, and in older, often overweight sufferers, who couldn’t use the insulin their bodies made or who didn’t make enough of it. Researchers in the United States later identified and classified these variations as Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, respectively.

Dr. Ezrin made his first public splash in 1954 when he and another researcher distinguished certain easily stainable cells in the pituitary gland. It was described as a significant contribution to the understanding of that organ.

Ten years later, “he cracked the pituitary,” said his son Bob, without realizing his father had used the same word in an article that made the front page of The Globe and Mail in late 1964.

“We have cracked the code of the pituitary gland,” Dr. Ezrin boasted at the time. Working on bodies supplied by the Toronto coroner’s office, Dr. Ezrin, who split his time between conducting research at the University of Toronto’s Banting Institute and maintaining a medical practice, and his team discovered that the gland is composed of several types of cells – at least five – and not two as previously thought. What’s more, “each different type of cell secretes a different hormone,” Dr. Ezrin explained.

The finding was said to have important implications for treating breast cancer and preventing blindness in certain diabetics.

He believed that if a doctor probed enough, obese patients would concede to being carbohydrate addicts, and that at the heart of most cases of morbid obesity was a lack of serotonin. “Many people that I speak to in the office will admit that they really cannot withstand the lure of chocolate or pasta, cake, ice cream or juice or soda, because it temporarily comforts them,” he told Canada AM in 2000. But the serotonin blip lasts “maybe half an hour.”

Obesity, he reasoned, usually begins with an accumulation of abdominal fat, which attracts chemicals called adipokines that “do mischief.” For one, they raise blood sugar, stimulating a further increase in insulin, which, in turn, builds more fat. This cycle can, and too often does, culminate in Type 2 diabetes.

Why do most fad diets rarely work in the long run? Because they are stressful, and stress depletes serotonin, he believed.

Apart from advocating a ketogenic (high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate) diet and aerobic exercise, he emphasized the need for deep sleep. Again, serotonin, which also regulates the sleep/wake cycle, played a key role.

“My father figured this out long before others did, that you need to sleep and that the solution for good, restorative sleep is enhanced serotonin,” said his daughter Cheryl Waters, a New York-based neurologist. To this end, Dr. Ezrin prescribed the drug trazodone, which had been used in large doses to combat depression. But he advised low doses to boost serotonin levels and induce deep sleep. “He had remarkable success,” Dr. Waters said. “He had people lose 300 and 400 pounds.”

Bob Ezrin recalled a huge extended family, whose regular visits prompted his mother to replace the dining room table with a boardroom table. The Ezrin home hosted salons for medical students as well, “and fiery discussions that always ended with music. There was medicine and music all the time.”

His father, meantime, lectured the kids so routinely on all manner of subjects that his mother bought a wooden lectern for their home, which Dr. Ezrin used. A formal man, “he would put on a three-piece suit on Sunday morning to buy bagels.”

There was a powerful sense of family in the home and a great love of children. So after their fifth child, Joanna, had her bat mitzvah at age 13 and the couple realized they probably wouldn’t be having any more children, they decided to adopt a baby boy named Michael. They soon discovered, however, that their new infant son had a fatal illness and although doctors from all over the world were mobilized to help treat him, he died shortly after his second birthday.

A week after Michael’s death, Bob Ezrin recalls, a lawyer called to see if they would like to add a baby girl to the family. The family made the decision together to adopt her and a year later they adopted another infant daughter, as well.

Dr. Ezrin was predeceased by his wife and son Michael. He is survived by seven children, Bob, Brian, Ronald, Cheryl Waters, Joanna Schauer, Renana and Judith Gamboa;13 grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and his sister.

“My Dad was our centre,” said his son Bob. “We are now searching for our centre.”

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