Part 1 of 2 (Part 2)
Introduction
For three decades we have been told that for our health and to lose weight we all should eat a diet based on carbohydrate foods: breads, pasta, fruit and vegetables, and low in fat.
Over the period there has been such a dramatic increase in obesity and related diseases that recently there has been a strong backlash: cut out foods high in carbohydrates and eat a lot more fat. In the 1990s and increasingly over the past year, this latest 'fad' diet has taken the world by storm.
There seems to be a general belief that the rash of low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets are 'new' or 'revolutionary' in some way. Popular books certainly give that impression. But nothing could be further from the truth. I started eating a low-carbohydrate diet in 1962 when a doctor advised me that this the best way to lose weight.
You may also think that these 'new' low-carbohydrate regimes have been pioneered by far-seeing and learned medical men. Again, this is incorrect. The truth is that we would probably never have heard of diets where people could lose weight eating that most calorific of foods, fat, if it had not been for a 19th century English carpenter by the name of William Banting.
Being overweight has affected a small proportion of the population for centuries but clinical obesity was relatively rare until the 20th century. Indeed obesity remained at a fairly stable low level until about 1980. Then its incidence began to increase dramatically.
By 1992 one in every ten people in Britain was overweight; a mere five years later that figure had almost doubled. In the USA it is even worse: by 1991 one in three adults was overweight. That was an increase of eight percent of the population over just one decade despite the fact that Americans spend a massive $33 billion a year on 'slimming'.
It may be hard to believe, but this has occurred in the face of increasing knowledge, awareness, and education about obesity, nutrition and exercise. It has happened despite the fact that calorie intake has gone down by twenty percent over the past ten years and exercise clubs have mushroomed.
More people are cutting calories now than ever before in their history yet more of them are becoming overweight. There is now a pandemic of increasing weight across the industrialized world.
But it needn't be like that, for nearly 150 years ago one man changed thinking on diet completely.
It all started with a small booklet entitled Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public, not written by a dietician or a doctor, but by an undertaker named William Banting. It became one of the most famous books on obesity ever written. First published in 1863, it went into many editions and continued to be published long after the author's death. The book was revolutionary and it should have changed western medical thinking on diet for weight loss forever.
William Banting was well-regarded in 19th century society. He was a fine carpenter, and undertaker to the rich and famous. None of Banting's family on either parent's side had any tendency to obesity. However, when he was in his thirties, William started to become overweight.
He consulted an eminent surgeon, a kind personal friend, who recommended increased "bodily exertion before any ordinary daily labors began". Banting had a heavy boat and lived near the river so he took up rowing the boat for two hours a day. All this did for him, however, was to give him a prodigious appetite. He put on weight and was advised to stop. So much for exercise!
He was advised that he could remedy his obesity by moderate and light food. But wasn't really told what was intended by this. He says he brought his system into a low, impoverished state without reducing his weight, which caused many obnoxious boils to appear and two rather formidable carbuncles. He went into hospital and was ably operated upon - but also fed into increased obesity.
Banting went into hospital twenty times in as many years for weight reduction. He tried swimming, walking, riding and taking the sea air. He drank "gallons of physic and liquor potassae", took the spa waters at Leamington, Cheltenham and Harrogate, and tried low-calorie, starvation diets; he took Turkish baths at a rate of up to three a week for a year but lost only 6 pounds in all that time, and had less and less energy.
He was assured by one physician, whom he calls "one of the ablest physicians in the land", that putting weight on was perfectly natural; that he, himself, had put on a pound for every year of manhood and he was not surprised by Banting's condition - he merely advised "more exercise, vapor baths and shampooing and medicine".
Banting tried every form of slimming treatment the medical profession could devise but it was all in vain. Eventually, discouraged and disillusioned - and still very fat - he gave up.
By 1862, at the age of 66, William Banting weighed 202 lbs and he was only 5 ft 5 ins tall. Banting says that although he was of no great weight or size, still, he says: "I could not stoop to tie my shoes, so to speak, nor to attend to the little offices humanity requires without considerable pain and difficulty which only the corpulent can understand, I have been compelled to go downstairs slowly backward to save the jar of increased weight on the knee and ankle joints and have been obliged to puff and blow over every slight exertion, particularly that of going upstairs." He also had an umbilical rupture, and other bodily ailments.
On top of this he found that his sight was failing and he was becoming increasingly deaf.
Because of this last problem, he consulted an aural specialist who made light of his case, sponged his ears out - and blistered the outer ear - without the slightest benefit and without enquiring into his other ailments. Banting was not satisfied: he left in a worse plight than when he went to the specialist.
Eventually, in August of 1862 Banting consulted a noted Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons: an ear, nose and throat specialist, Dr. William Harvey. It was an historic meeting.
Dr. Harvey had recently returned from a symposium in Paris where he had heard Dr Claude Bernard, a renowned physiologist, talk of a new theory about the part the liver played in the disease of diabetes. Bernard believed that the liver, as well as secreting bile, also secreted a sugar-like substance that it made from elements of the blood passing through it. This started Harvey's thinking about the roles of the various food elements in diabetes and he began a major course of research into the whole question of the way in which fats, sugars and starches affected the body.
When Dr. Harvey met Banting, he was interested as much by Banting's obesity as by his deafness, for he recognised that the one was the cause of the other. So Harvey put Banting on a diet. By Christmas, Banting was down to 184 lbs and, by the following August, 156 lbs.
Banting's diet to that date had followed this pattern:
Banting says he had little comfort and far less sound sleep.
Harvey's advice to him was to give up bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes. These, he told Banting, contained starch and saccharine matter tending to create fat and were to be avoided altogether. The word 'saccharine' meant sugar.
When told what he could not eat, Banting's immediate thought was that he had very little left to live on. Harvey soon showed him that really there was ample and Banting was only too happy to give the plan a fair trial. Within a very few days, he says, he derived immense benefit from it: the plan leading to an excellent night's rest with six to eight hours' sleep per night.
For each meal, Harvey allowed Banting:
Champagne, port and beer were forbidden and he could eat only one ounce of toast.
On this diet Banting lost nearly 1 lb per week from August 1862 to August 1863. In his own words he said:
"I can confidently state that quantity of diet may safely be left to the natural appetite; and that it is quality only which is essential to abate and cure corpulence. . . . These important desiderata have been attained by the most easy and comfortable means . . . by a system of diet, that formerly I should have thought dangerously generous."
After 38 weeks. Banting felt better than he had for the past 20 years.
By the end of the year, not only had his hearing been restored, he had much more vitality and he had lost 46 lbs in weight and 12 1/4 inches off his waist. He suffered no inconvenience whatever from the new diet, was able to come downstairs forward naturally with perfect ease, go upstairs and take exercise freely without the slightest inconvenience, could perform every necessary office for himself, the umbilical rupture was greatly ameliorated and gave him no anxiety, his sight was restored, his hearing improved, his other bodily ailments were ameliorated and passed into the matter of history.
Banting was delighted. He would have gone through hell to achieve all this but it had not been necessary. Indeed the diet allowed so much food, and it was so easy to maintain, that Banting said of it:
"I can conscientiously assert I never lived so well as under the new plan of dietary, which I should have formerly thought a dangerous, extravagant trespass upon health."
He says that this present dietary table is far superior to what he was eating before:
"more luxurious and liberal, independent of its blessed effect, but when it is proved to be more healthful, the comparisons are simply ridiculous." "I am very much better both bodily and mentally and pleased to believe that I hold the reins of health and comfort in my own hands." "It is simply miraculous and I am thankful to Almighty Providence for directing me through an extraordinary chance to the care of a man who worked such a change in so short a time."
"more luxurious and liberal, independent of its blessed effect, but when it is proved to be more healthful, the comparisons are simply ridiculous."
"I am very much better both bodily and mentally and pleased to believe that I hold the reins of health and comfort in my own hands."
"It is simply miraculous and I am thankful to Almighty Providence for directing me through an extraordinary chance to the care of a man who worked such a change in so short a time."
It is quite obvious from these comments that Banting didn't need the strength of willpower that today's slimmer needs; that he found his weight-loss diet very easy to maintain.
He wish that the medical profession would acquaint themselves with the cure for obesity so that so many men would not descend into early graves, as he believed many did, from apoplexy, and would not endure on Earth so much bodily and mental infirmity.
Banting was so pleased with his progress that on top of Harvey's fees, he gave the doctor £50 to be distributed amongst Harvey's favorite hospitals. Although, despite this, he still felt deeply obligated in a way that he could never hope to repay.
But in 1868, Banting published a prospectus and started a fund to found and endow a new institution for the service of humanity - the Middlesex County Convalescent Hospital.
It was to be for those working-class people who could not afford to convalesce but had to return to work to make ends meet thus allowing no time to get over their hospital ordeal and so succumbed to relapses.
There was a small home at Walton on Thames which, although small, was, he thought, possibly sufficient for the purpose. Banting estimated that £12,000 per year was needed to run it.
Banting put up £500, his son £100 and two other members of his family a further £50; with other patrons he raised a total of £5,000.
Banting charged nothing for the first two editions of his book - he didn't want the 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 6d each. Copies of the third edition, still in 1863, were sold at 1/- 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.
[ Continue to Part 2 ]
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Dr. Mercola's Comments:
On April 28, 2003, Putnam will be publishing my first major book called The No-Grain Diet, which will be available in bookstores throughout the U.S. and beyond. Quite amazing that nearly 150 years prior to the publication of my first book, William Banting published his book emphasizing many of the same principles.
The No-Grain Diet will provide you a comprehensive and practical approach to implementing an individualized dietary plan with the aid of Metabolic Typing that leads to your healing, ideal weight and optimal health.
In addition to its focus on my eating plan, what will set The No-Grain Diet apart from other dietary and health books is my focus on maintaining the healthy habits you adopt; whether people change their diet to lose weight, heal a disease, guard against illness, or simply improve their health, they are often successful at the start.
However, as time goes by, most fall back into the old patterns that sabotaged their health in the first place. This is because there was only a focus on changing negative physical habits, not changing negative emotions contributing to those habits. In The No-Grain Diet, I will show you how, by using EFT, you can eliminate those negative emotions and far more easily maintain your healthy eating plan and lifestyle for good.
As for grains in the human diet overall, there is fairly strong evidence from the Paleolithic era that 6,000 years ago, most humans did not consume many grains. They were hunter-gatherers who subsisted mostly on vegetables and meats. 6,000 years is a mere blip in a biological sense for humans: over 99% of our genetic make-up was in place, in fact, before we ever started consuming grains.
When considered from this perspective alone, it's not too surprising that grains can cause a wide array of health issues: contemporary humans have not suddenly evolved mechanisms to incorporate the high carbohydrates from starch- and sugar-rich foods into their diet.
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Footnotes:
i. British Medical Journal Thyroid function tests time for a reassessment May 13, 2000 320:1332-1334 ii. Makino M, Oda N, Miura N, et. al. Effect of eicosapentaenoic acid ethyl ester on hypothyroid function. J Endocrinol. 2001 Nov;171(2):259-65. iii. Pehowich DJ. Thyroid hormone status and membrane n-3 fatty acid content influence mitochondrial proton leak. Biochim Biophys Acta. 1999 Apr 21;1411(1):192-200.
i. British Medical Journal Thyroid function tests time for a reassessment May 13, 2000 320:1332-1334
ii. Makino M, Oda N, Miura N, et. al. Effect of eicosapentaenoic acid ethyl ester on hypothyroid function. J Endocrinol. 2001 Nov;171(2):259-65.
iii. Pehowich DJ. Thyroid hormone status and membrane n-3 fatty acid content influence mitochondrial proton leak. Biochim Biophys Acta. 1999 Apr 21;1411(1):192-200.