1 post from January 2009

This book has 24 chapters, plus a prologue and pages of references.  So far I have read the book twice and am now re-reading and underlining.

Here is my summary of the prologue.

"A Brief History of Banting" 

William Banting was in 1862, sixty-six years old, five foot five and weighed over 200 pounds.  He had trouble tying his shoes, and had trouble with many aspects of his life.  He tried many different methods to help him lose weight.  When he took up rowing, his appetite and muscles increased as well as his weight.  When he tried to cut back on his total food intake he was exhausted. He got bigger.  He tried all manner of sports and hard work and purgatives and laxatives and nothing would prevent him from gaining even more weight.

Eventually, he was experiencing deafness from fat on his eardrum.  He consulted an aural surgeon named William Harvey, who had heard in Paris the physiologist Claude Bernard lecture on diabetes.  Harvey created an eating plan based on Bernard's lecture. "It was well known, Harvey later explained, that a diet of only meat and dairy would check the secretion of sugar in the urine of a diabetic.  This in turn suggested that complete abstinence from sugars and starches might do the same.  'Knowing too that a saccharine and farinaceous diet is used to fatten certain animals...if a purely animal diet were useful in the latter disease, a combination of animal food with such vegetable diet as contained neither sugar nor starch, might serve to arrest the undue formation of fat.'"

Banting ate of this diet and lost fifty pounds.  He felt well and healthy. He printed, at his own expense, a sixteen page pamphlet  called Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public.  This started the popular dieting term, banting or to bant.  It seemed to be extremely successful. Letter on Corpulence Part 1     Letter on Corpulence part 2

Some of the medical community of the time were skeptical and others attacked him outright.  They also said that the diet was already well known. "The medical literature , wrote The Lancet, "is tolerably complete, and supplies abundant evidence that all which Mr. Banting advises has been writeen over and over again."  Banting responded that this might well have been so, but it was news to him and other corpulent individuals." They also accused the diet of being dangerous but could not prove it without a "fair trial".

Other people who did research on reduced carbohydrate diets were Claude Bernard, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and Jean-Francois Dancel, Alfred William Moore and John Harvey. (Moore and Harvey were published in 1860 and 1861)

In 1825 Brillant-Savarin published The Physiology of Taste where he identified the cause of obesity because fat people "proclaimed the joys of bread, rice, and potatoes. He added that the effects of this intake were exacerbated when sugar was consumed as well.  His recommendation reducing diet, not surprisingly, was 'more or less rigid abstinence from everything that is starchy or floury.'"

Another author, Dancel wrote in 1844, based on the work of German chemist Justus von Liebig "who at the time was defending his belief that fat is formed in animals primarily from the ingestion of fats, starches, sugars, and that protein is used exclusively for the restoration or creation of muscular tissue. 'All food which is not flesh--all food rich is carbon and hydrogen--must have a tendency to produce fat.'"

There were several other publications supporting reduced carbohydrate dieting, most of the high fat kind, but Max Joseph Oertel was more restrictive of fats and included more vegetables and bread.  He treated Prince Otto von Bismarck who lost 60 pounds in a year.

Part 2 of prologue to follow.