If you liked Taubes' GCBC/Why We Get Fat, you'll love this..

Holy *kitten* this is bad stuff.

interesting. Thank you

Haha wow I didn't realise she lost weight like that and then did a total 180... how strange!

If she lost all her weight by eating carbs and spiking and it worked... then why would it make sense to attack carbs in the book, and seemingly fruit and vegetables in the process. Sounds like she pretty much demonises fruit!

Where did all this carb theory originate from anyway - Atkins?

Haha wow I didn't realise she lost weight like that and then did a total 180... how strange!

If she lost all her weight by eating carbs and spiking and it worked... then why would it make sense to attack carbs in the book, and seemingly fruit and vegetables in the process. Sounds like she pretty much demonises fruit!

Where did all this carb theory originate from anyway - Atkins?

I know Atkins popularized the metabolic advantage theory, even though it was around long before he wrote his book. Not sure on who really popularized demonizing insulin and therefore carbs for all the current ills though

I know Eades wrote about the metabolic advantage (but did state only minor). Had that big fight with Colpo about it over the net.

Lol Eades, you mean him saying throw out all the tightly controlled studies that show no metabolic advantage because there might be cheating in them but instead use the 50% of ad lib studies that do show it as proof, while conveniently ignoring the other 50% of ad lib studies that don't?

Yeh that!!

bump

I had these notes on Banting copied into a word doc ages ago:

Notes on Banting

Banting's letter on corpulence was apparently (as per the Neanderthin) the world's first book on diet and weight loss written by an amateur in 1869. Banting was ridiculed and ignored by the medical community.

It caused a stir in the 1860s, it became hugely popular .. because it worked ... and it really remained the orthodox view on dieting for about 100 years. Despite people like Ignatovsky who started animal experiments in the early 1900s, things didn't even begin to change until Ancel Keys came along in the 1950s, and even then - his position on the AHA only really brought the whole low fat disaster down upon us about 30 years ago, as I say over a century after Banting and Harvey.

In the early days of Weight Watchers, the first thing dieters gave up ... was bread potatoes and sugar.
Also "banting" became synomynous with dieting for much of that time ... so much so that the word entered the language ... and not just English, I think its Sweden which still has the Banta diet ... which comes directly from their word which has the same source.

More notes:
A high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet was first popularized in 1863 by William Banting, a retired London undertaker who weighed 202 pounds and measured 65 inches in height (body mass index, 34). For decades he had struggled with obesity (corpulence), and at age 60 he was near his wit's end. He had to walk down stairs backwards, “and with every exertion puffed and blowed in a way that was unseeming and disagreeable.”

One day in 1862, Banting had a serendipitous encounter with a young physician named William Harvey (not the 17th-century Harvey of blood circulation fame). Harvey had spent time in Paris during the 1850s studying under Claude Bernard. One of Bernard's ideas was that the liver secreted glucose. As Harvey understood it, “this glucose could be directly produced in the liver by the ingestion of sugar and starch and … [because] a purely animal diet greatly … checked the secretion of diabetic urine … it occurred to me that if a purely animal diet was useful in the latter disease, a combination of animal food with such vegetable matters as contained neither sugar nor starch might serve to arrest the undue formation of fat.”

That is exactly what he prescribed to Banting. It was, in short, the first time anyone had formally prescribed a low-carbohydrate diet for weight loss. In less than a year, Banting had lost 46 pounds and pronounced himself “cured” of his “insidious creeping enemy.” Convinced that his mission in life was to help his fellow corpulents onto what he called his “tramway of happiness,” Banting wrote a short account of his experience and cure, A Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. The response was the first mass dieting craze. After 2500 copies were given away, Banting's Letter went into 3 editions in as many years, selling upward of 100,000 copies. His name became a verb; until 1963, the Concise Oxford Dictionary defined “banting” and “to bant” as meaning “treatment of obesity by abstinence from sugar and starch.”

Banting and Harvey did not want any publicity, and Banting—fearing that “it might appear a puff which I know he abhors”—refused to identify Harvey in his first 4 editions. Moreover, when the money rolled in, it became, in Banting's word, an “embarrassment.” Banting donated all profits from his writing to charity and in later editions of his pamphlet published all criticisms he had received of the diet.

The diet was taken up in 1879 with great fanfare by the Comte de Chambord, the expatriate king of France. De Chambord quickly lost >50 pounds. But in 1883, the Comte fell ill. Although the immediate cause of his death still is unclear, his doctors all agreed that he had undermined his health by losing so much weight so quickly. Harvey had written: “Extremes should be avoided. As a rule, the diminution should not be allowed to progress more rapidly than at the rate of 1 pound per week and it ought not to be carried to too great an extent.”

By then, however, both Banting and Harvey were dead. The latter had lived the productive life of a physician-scholar. Banting had lived to age 81, maintaining his reduced size. His success in doing so may suggest a middle way for today's warring factions of those for and against low-carbohydrate diets. Beginning in the late 1860s, Banting had slowly shifted his diet in the direction of reducing proteins and fats, controlling portion size, and eating carbohydrates in moderation. Later he wrote, “This deviation convinces me that I have hold of the power of maintaining the happy medium in my own hands.” In other words, science or not, proteins or carbohydrates, it is human will and humane advice—not bestsellers—that make for a good diet.

Some more notes on the westonaprice site:
http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/banting.html
He put up 3,500 pounds, his son 3,100 and two other members of his family a further 350, With other patrons he raised a total of 35,000 pounds.
Banting charged nothing for the first two editions of his book—he didn't want to be accused of doing it merely for profit. He had printed 1,000 copies of the first edition and he gave them away.

The second edition numbered 1,500 which he also gave away although they cost him 6 pence each. Copies of the third edition, still in 1863, were sold at 1 pound each.

When Banting's booklet, in which he described the diet and its amazing results, was published, it was so contrary to the established doctrine that it set up a howl of protest among members of the medical profession. The "Banting Diet" became the center of a bitter controversy and Banting's papers and book were ridiculed and distorted. No one could deny that the diet worked, but as a layman had published it—and medical men were anxious that their position in society should not be undermined—they felt bound to attack it. Banting's paper was criticized solely on the grounds that it was "unscientific."
Later, Dr. Harvey had a problem too. He had an effective treatment for obesity but not a convincing theory to explain it. As he was a medical man, and so easier for the other members of his profession to attack, he came in for a great deal of ridicule until, in the end, his practice began to suffer.

However, the public was impressed. Many desperate overweight people tried the diet and found that it worked. Like it or not, the medical profession could not ignore it. Its obvious success meant that the Banting Diet had to be explained somehow.
To the rescue from Stuttgart came a Dr. Felix Niemeyer. He managed to make the new diet acceptable with a total shift in its philosophy. At that time, the theory was that carbohydrates and fat burned together in the lungs to produce heat. The two were called "respiratory foods." After examining Banting's paper, Niemeyer came up with an answer to the doctors' problem. All doctors knew that protein was not fattening, only the respiratory foods—fats and carbohydrates. He, therefore, interpreted "meat" to mean only lean meat with the fat trimmed off and this subtle change solved the problem. The Banting Diet became a high protein diet with both carbohydrate and fat restricted. This altered diet became enshrined in history and still forms the basis of slimming diets today.

Banting's descriptions of the diet are quite clear, however. Other than the prohibition against butter and pork, nowhere is there any instruction to remove the fat from meat and there is no restriction on the way food was cooked or on the total quantity of food which may be taken. Only carbohydrate—sugars and starches—are restricted. The reason that butter and pork were denied him was that it was thought at this time that they too contained starch.

Banting, who lived in physical comfort and remained at a normal weight until his death in 1878 at the age of 81, always maintained that Dr. Niemeyer's altered diet was far inferior to the one that had so changed his life.

The Banting Diet Is Confirmed
Banting's Letter on Corpulence travelled widely. In the 1890s, an American doctor, Helen Densmore, modelled diets on Banting. She tells how she and her patients lost an average 10-15 pounds in the first month on the diet and then 6-8 pounds in subsequent months "by a diet from which bread, cereals and starchy food were excluded." Her advice to would-be slimmers was: "One pound of beef or mutton or fish per day with a moderate amount of the non-starchy vegetables will be found ample for any obese person of sedentary habits."

Dr. Densmore was scathing of those others of her profession who derided Banting's diet. She says of them: "Those very specialists who are at this time prospering greatly by the reduction of obesity and who are indebted to Mr. Banting for all their prosperity are loud, nevertheless, in their condemnation of the Banting method."

Over the following seventy years many epidemiological studies and clinical trials were conducted in several countries and the evidence mounted. There was by the mid-1950s no doubt that the low-carbohydrate diet worked and clinical trials at the Middlesex Hospital in London had demonstrated how it worked. Doctors could now put their overweight patients on a dietary regime which enjoyed overwhelming evidence of benefit and which was easy to follow and live on for life.

But it was not to be. Dieticians just couldn't seem to get their heads round the concept that eating what looked like a high-calorie diet could possibly be effective for weight loss. Or, perhaps they were afraid to lose face by admitting that they had been wrong. So they continued, myopically, to recommend that if you were overweight, it was your own fault —you were eating too much or not taking enough exercise, or both. That made life very easy for the dietician while it ruined the life of the patient. By the late 1970s fat was getting a bad name as a cause of heart disease (quite incorrectly as we now know). Now fat was banned for other health reasons and carbohydrates were advocated even more strongly.

Which is why, at the start of the 21st Century, at a time when most of us are dieting, are eating fewer calories and less fat, and taking more exercise than ever before in our history, we are getting fatter than ever before in our history.
It is no coincidence that obesity is sky-rocketing today—healthy eating advises a high-carbohydrate, lowfat diet. The exact opposite of Banting's diet.

Not long after Banting's Letter on Corpulence was published the verb "to Bant" entered the language and people losing weight said they were "Banting." It remained in common parlance well into this century and one still hears it occasionally today.
Jan Freden, of Uppsala, Sweden, tells me that in Sweden, "Banting" is still the word most commonly used for dieting to achieve weight loss. So in Sweden they say: "Nej, tack, jag bantar" or "No thank you, I am banting."
And "banting" is the noun used. We would be well advised to adopt it again.
A version of this article won the prestigious Sophie Coe Prize
for the 2002 Oxford Symposium on Food History.
Visit Barry Groves' website at www.second-opinions.co.uk.