that specialized in weight loss. And she made informational pamphlets available to the readers of her syndicated columns; those who sent for these pamphlets received Peters's strategies for how to successfully lose weight. In 1930, while on a trip by steamship to a medical conference in London, she became ill with neuralgia, and her condition worsened during the trip. She died of pneumonia in late June, 1930. She was survived by her former husband Louis H. Peters. Her book remains in circulation and is still quoted today. Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories Having grown up a hefty child and once weighing 220 lbs, she was extremely conscious of the problems weight presented to her. Peters's book Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories, targeted specifically to American women, became extremely popular, selling 2 million copies. People found it witty and entertaining. The book was the first dieting book to become a bestseller, and it remained in the top ten non-fiction bestselling books from 1922 to 1926, topping the list for two years running, in 1924 and 1925. In the book, she explained the concept of the calorie as a scientific unit of measurement of the energy potentially available from food. The concept of the calorie was so new that her book even provides instruction on the word's pronunciation. She explains the importance of balancing food intake and energy used, and suggests a number of exercises, supported with simple cartoons. She explains in her book that "hereafter you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 350 calories of pie". She shows women how to calculate their ideal weight with a formula. Her book included estimates of food portions that would contain 100 calories, based on research in a variety of technical publications that were not available to the general reader. She also indicates how many calories someone should eat per pound of ideal body weight, to keep the ideal weight that her system suggests (similar to body mass index). She paid less attention to issues of what sorts of foods a person should eat. Under her system, a person of Peters's height could eat whatever she wanted, as long as she maintained a strict diet of 1,200 calories a day. However, she warned against eating candy, because she