WILLIAM
BANTING:
The Father of the Low-Carbohydrate Diet
Whether we like it or not Low Carb Diets are here to stay. It
matters not if we blame Atkins, Willett, the Hellers or even Suzanne
Summers there is going to be someone who will be touting Low Carb Diets
for our patients and there will be controversy. But where did it all
start.
While searching for some information about Frederick
G. Banting, one of the discoverers of insulin, I came upon another Banting.
William, who in 1863 wrote the first low carbohydrate diet book, Letter
on Corpulence Addressed to the Public. Banting had such a big influence
in his time that his name was passed into language as the verb “to
bant” meaning to diet.
William Banting (1796-1878)
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.. 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.
Only three men in history have been immortalized by having their names
enter the English language as verbs. The first was Irishman, Captain
Boycott, whose name entered the language in the 1860s. Another was Louis
Pasteur and the third was the subject of this article – William
Banting, a man who came to have a great impact on many peoples' lives,
including mine.
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
industrialised world.
But it needn't be like that, for nearly 140 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.
But if he had remained only that, his name would probably be remembered
today merely as the Duke of Wellington's coffin maker, if indeed it
were remembered at all.
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 labours 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, vapour 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 recognized 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:
Breakfast: bread and milk for breakfast, or a
pint of tea with plenty of milk and sugar, and buttered toast (this
was before the invention of breakfast cereals but it is actually very
similar to the modern cereal breakfast);
Dinner: meat, beer, bread and pastry for dinner;
Tea: a meal similar to breakfast;
Supper: generally a fruit tart or bread and milk.
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:
up to six ounces of bacon, beef, mutton, venison,
kidneys, fish or any form of poultry or game;
the 'fruit of any pudding' – he was denied the pastry
any vegetable except potato;
and at dinner, two or three glasses of good claret, sherry or Madeira.
Banting could drink tea without milk or sugar.
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.”
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.
Next week : . The 'Banting Diet'
becomes the centre of a bitter controversy and Banting's papers and
book were ridiculed and distorted.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
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