Before there was the American Tobacco Complex or "Bull Durham", before we were a magnet for the creative class or one of the foodiest cities in the nation, before even the maturation of the Research Triangle Park and a long string of nationally ranked Blue Devil basketball teams, there was The Rice Diet.

Observing its 70th anniversary this year, the Rice Diet attracted nationwide attention to Duke and to Durham, and brought a steady stream of celebrities and notables to spend weeks or months here, trying to maintain a figurative low profile while sharply lowering the profile of their figures.

Next weekend, the program, which has had no connection to Duke since 1992, will celebrate the anniversary.

Walter Kempner, a Duke physician, developed the diet in 1939 to help combat high blood pressure, at the time a condition that almost guaranteed premature mortality. Aiming to sharply reduce sodium in a person's diet, the regimen not only lowered blood pressure but became a significant weight-loss program.

Unlike many fad diets, the program aimed to help people permanently adjust their food choices to keep blood pressure and weight down. (Granted, some celebrity customers, at least, were repeat customers for whom the permanent change remained elusive).

"It's a whole paradigm shift in lifestyle," current participant Jennifer Fusaro told Maryann Barone, a correspondent for The Herald-Sun. Or, as staff member Gurkin Rosati put it, "the results you get here are so dramatic that coming into work is a joy. It works. People like the results."

The program has not been immune from controversy. In the 1990s, Kempner eventually confidentially settled a lawsuit by a patient that accused him of turning her into a "sex slave."

But the is a blemish overshadowed by the thousands who have seen their lives improved by the Rice Diet, yet another in Durham's many claims to national attention.