The AF L-C Diet - CHAPTER TWO: THE HISTORY OF THE LOW CARBOHYDRATE DIET
The low carbohydrate diet represents a revolutionary principle of weight control in the sense that anything which attacks an entrenched regime is revolutionary. And the rule of the calorie count, in modern dietetic thinking, is certainly entrenched. So much so, that the most difficult thing you must co in order to benefit from the low carbohydrate diet is to put yourself through a certain amo8unt of mental readjustment before you even begin to adjust your menu.
To borrow a concept from George Orwell, you will be required to do some nutritional Newthink. Dethrone the calorie. A considerable amount of research now indicates that it is not the number of calories you take in, but the kind, that affects the formation of body fat. You may be eating not too many calories, but more carbohydrate calories than your body can burn up.
Paradoxically, we can go back a hundred years and find an instance when this “new” principle was put into successful operation. The results were spectacular then, but the basis for them was, by our present scientific evaluations, incompletely analyzed and misunderstood. In consequence, the principle was sidetracked out of the mainstream of weight-control experimentation, and the calorie became king – or tyrant.
The episode was recorded for us by an otherwise uneminent Victoria, one William Banting. If you are addicted to the reading of Victorian novels, his name may ring a bell, somewhere you will have encountered young ladies who couldn’t have a second bun for tea because they were “banting.” Your eye may have slid over this as merely another example of that odd way the British have with slang: if the girl couldn’t have seconds, she was obviously dieting, and what had “banting” to do with dieting?
Had you been around at the time, you would have known. William Banting was a prosperous London coffin-maker who constructed final resting places for many notables of his time, the Duke of Wellington among them. It seems probably that Mr. Banting’s apprentices did the actual woodwork involved, for his measurements make it difficult to see how he would have approached close enough to a work bench to be of much use. He stood less than five and a half feet tall and weighed something over two hundred pounds. In his “Letter on Corpulence,” which he wrote in 1864 to acquaint the public with his dramatic and almost miraculous story, he makes the touching observation that he could not tie his own shoelaces or come down a flight of steps facing front. We can infer the he must have had trouble leading any kind of normal life.
Diets that didn’t work
Mr. Banting was not happy with this state of affairs. He struggled for years to take off weight. He tried everything that the medical profession of that day would either sanction or not positively prohibit. He tried steaming, spas, starvation diets, he subjected himself to leeching and purging, he tried exercise, which must have taken superhuman effort in a man of his proportions. In 1862 William Banting was a discouraged – and still enormously heavy – gentleman in his sixties, who knew a great deal about the prevailing ideas in weight reduction – and knew that none worked for him.
The Banting had an earache and realized that he was beginning to go deaf in one ear. For this reason, and no other, he consulted William Harvey, a noted ear, nose, and throat surgeon – a historical meeting in the annals of weight-control history. Harvey had recently returned from Paris, where he had heard the renowned French physiologist Claude Bernard describe some new theories about the role of the liver in body chemistry. Bernard believed that the liver secreted not only bile, but a sugar-like substance which it prepared at the expense of the blood elements that passed through it.
This theory had a profound effect on the study of diabetes. Harvey, who was much interested in diabetes, began to do a great deal of independent and evidently rather brilliant thinking on the whole question of how the body handles food elements, particularly fats, sugars, and starches. When William Banting presented himself, Harvey was as much interested in his obesity as he was in his ear, especially as the doctor soon satisfied himself that there was no organic reason for the ear trouble. Was it possible, Harvey wondered, that excess fat was pressing on some part of the inner ear, causing the pain and partial deafness?
A startling experiment
Nobody could have been readier than Blanting to blame overweight for anything that went wrong with him. He became Harvey’s willing, and shortly enthusiastic, collaborator in an experimental diet which was startling enough even for those days, when heavy eating was the fashion. It is truly shocking to today’s weight-watchers, most of who are so well schooled in computing calories that they can give you to the nearest fraction, the calorie count of a dish containing fourteen ingredients from Upper Nepal.
For each meal, including breakfast, Banking was allowed up to five ounces of beef, mutton, kidneys, fish, bacon, venison, or any kind of poultry. (Today’s average serving is three to four ounces.) He was to avoid sweets, flour, and starchy materials, but there were no similar restrictions as to the fat that came with his meat, so far as we know. He was permitted three or four ounces of biscuit, rusk, or toast, any vegetable except potato, as much tea as he liked without milk or sugar, a few ounces of fruit; and with lunch and supper two or three glasses of claret, sherry, or Madeira to wash down this considerable amount of food. He was permitted a nightcap of anything except champagne, port, or beer.
By modern calculation, William Banting must have been taking in not much less than 2800 calories a day. And in four months he had lost more than twenty pounds. By the end of his first year on Harvey’s diet he was fifty pounds lighter. His earache was long gone, his hearing restored. He was firmer and more vigorous than he had been in years. He had achieved this while eating fully and well, to say the least. He had been deprived only of sugars and starches. In other words, he had reduced dramatically, and without the slightest risk to his health, by practically eliminating carbohydrates from his daily food intake.
Understandly enthusiastic, Banting – who must have been a remarkable man – set to work to proselytize for this unorthodox, yet magnificently successful, treatment. At his own expense he published in 1864, his now famous “Letter on Corpulence.” In it he described his diet, and added a heartfelt testimonial in which he tried to explain what it meant to a man of his history to be able to move about freely, exercise if he liked, and dress himself without assistance.
Banting’s sincerity and his spectacular results impressed the public. But the medical profession was outraged, as he had suspected it would be, at the revolutionary suggestion that it m9ight be possible to eat fat, among other things, to take fat off. The notion that a man might eat as much as he liked, as long as he excluded sugar and starch from his diet, was extraordinary enough. But that it should be put forward by a presumptuous layman without a scientific qualification to his name – Banting, in fact, gave the fullest possible credit to William Harvey, but this did not in the end do either of them much good – was more than the medical “establishment” was prepared to put up with. It was pointed out with scorn that the material had not even appeared in any respectable professional organ. The whole idea was denounced as impertinent, ridiculous, dangerous.
Ridiculous? It works!
But meanwhile, many determined, or perhaps desperate, fat people tried Banting’s diet, and found that ridiculous or not, it worked. This meant that the theory behind it could not be dismissed quite so lightly. The noted Dr. Felix von Niemeyer of Stuttgart undertook to investigate it, and succeeded in bringing off a curious shift of emphasis by which it was to appear that the meat in Banting’s diet had been lean meat, trimmed of fat. He was left, therefore, with what we would now call a high protein diet, low in fat and carbohydrates. Dr. von Niemeyer was willing to go along with this, and with his endorsement so was every other physician interested in obesity.
These altered “Banting Diets” became very popular, and explain how it was that “banting” became synonymous with “slimming” in England around the turn of the century. But to the end of his days William Banting maintained that the modified diet was, in principle and in practice, far inferior to the diet which had so altered his life and on which he had been allowed to eat plenty of fat with his meat.
Interesting confirmation that it was possible to get along with few or even no carbohydrates in the diet came in 1906, when a young Harvard anthropology instructor named Viljalmur Stefansson eagerly accepted a chance to go to the Artic with the Leffinwell-Mikkelson Expedition. Stefansson – who afterward of course became a world-famous anthropologist-explorer – went on ahead, planning to rendezvous with the expedition’s ship at Herschel Island. But by some chance the rendezvous miscarried, and Stefansson was left to spend an Article winter with the Eskimos.
Artic diet: fish washed down with water
This was a rich research plum for a young scientist to chew on, but after a few days Stefansson began to fear that he might not live long enough to take advantage of it. His charming, cheerful, and hospitable hosts lived entirely on a diet of fish, washed down with water in which gobbets of fish were briefly stewed. Stefansson’s twentieth-century stomach rebelled at this primitive fare. He tried to improve it by broiling the fish, but this swiftly resulted in weakness, dizziness, and symptoms of malnutrition, and he deduced that on this hi8ghly restricted diet the body had to have not only the protein in the fish but the fat and other nutrient materials that were leached out into the water. Thus presented with a life-and-death reason for forcing down both fish and broth, Stefansson tried harder. Eventually he adjusted both physically and psychologically, and at the end of his time with the Eskimos, he had managed as well as any of them. In addition he felt fine and seemed in excellent condition.
He had also become exceedingly interested in the possibility that a diet high I proteins and fats and low in carbohydrates might serve all men better than the civilized diet of the world from which he had come. “Balanced” meals in which relatively small amounts of meat or other protein were garlanded with rice, potatoes, or other starches, accompanied by bread and high-carbohydrate vegetables, followed by sweet desserts and sugared coffee . . . were these perhaps balanced in the wrong direction?
Like Banting, Stefansson began to hammer at the fortress of established nutritional thinking. He had about the same success. As the years went by his stature as anthropologist-explorer because enormous and unassailable, but his ideas about nutrition were simply bypassed.
Some time after his first experience with the Eskimo-diet, Stefansson and a companion were sent to the Arctic by the American Museum of Natural History for a year of research. They were handsomely equipped with every necessity, including full stories for the year of “civilized” food. But Stefansson and his companion, Dr. Anderson, elected to live in a fashion indigenous to the land they were studying. This meant a “hunter’s diet” – fish they could catch, the meat they could kill, the water they could find – a way of life by which men had nourished themselves in the ages before they learned to plant and reap. The one-year project stretched into four, during which the two young men ranged over the Canadian Arctic living entirely on their primitive diet. They found that when any component of it became scarce – as during one period when they had difficulty obtaining seal oil and had to eat lean caribou meat without additional fat – they became ill. As soon as the oil was restored, they recovered. As in Stefansson’s earlier experience, he suffered no ill effects whatsoever, nor did Anderson, on what most nutritionists and certainly the ordinary civilized man would have considered a deprivation diet.
Healthy on a “deprivation diet”
It seemed evident to Stefansson, as it had to Banting, that once adjusted to a plentiful diet in which only carbohydrates were restricted, his body would manufacture all the nutrients it needed for perfect functioning. He tested his theories later in controlled experiments, but although research along these lines was certainly being conducted at numerous nutritional study centers, nobody was ready to come forward with a positive statement that it was possible to stay healthy – perhaps healthier than you had ever been – to reduce excess fat, and to remain slender, muscular, and vigorous on a diet that ignored the total number of calories you ingested and concentrated instead on the amount of carbohydrate.
In 1928, Stefansson took part in a strictly controlled project at Bellevue Hospital, in which medical nutritional, and anthropological experts from some of the most august institutions in the country hoped to learn more about what happened to the human body on an all-meat, non-vegetable le, non-farinaceous diet. Research was directed by Dr. Eugene F. DuBois, medical director of the Russell Sage Foundation (subsequently chief physician at New York Hospital and Professor of Physiology at Cornell University Medical College). Once again Stefansson discovered that he could get along superbly on a combination of meats and fats, and that when fats were restricted he suffered. The absence of carbohydrate appeared to have only good effects. At the end of a year on this regimen, the research team reported that almost at once Stefansson had reduced a few pounds to his best normal weight, which he had thereafter maintained with no trouble. He showed no deficiency symptoms. His body appeared to have manufactured all its mineral and vitamin needs from the food it had been given. There was no loss of energy; in fact, as before, Stefansson functioned better than ever on this restricted diet and it seemed evident that when carbohydrate calories were not available for energy his body was perfectly capable of deriving what it needed from protein with fat.
The results of the test were of course published, but they left the general public cold. People were convinced that a diet which offered you as much mean as you could eat (the research indicated that a person on this diet would be able to eat, and would have appetite for, only as much as his body required) and which included the dreaded item fat, could result online in supplying a lethal number of calories. The possibility that it was not the number but the kind, and how the body used them, that added up to excess fat simply had no appeal.
Calories: the beginning of the end
Science, however, was interested. In 1944 Dr. Blake F. Donaldson conducted a famous experiment with obese patients at New York Hospital, reducing them on diets high in proteins and fats. Dr. Donaldson’s book, Strong Medicine, was another signpost along the road on which Banting had embarked eighty years earlier. But the average dieter went on counting calories, all kinds together, oblivious that more and more research was piling up to suggest that with his low calorie carrot salad, high in carbohydrates, he was doing his measurements more harm than if he had satisfied his hunger with a nice slice of ham – higher in total calories, but zero in carbohydrates.
A few years afterward the E.I. du Pont company headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, undertook a weight-control program involving a group of its executives who had been unsuccessful with low calorie diets. Under the direction of Dr. Albert W. Pennington and Dr. George H. Gehrmann, director of du Pont’s medical division, these overweight individuals were allowed all the protein and fat they wanted. Total calorie intake was unrestricted, in some cases going up to 3000 or more calories per day – but carbohydrate was withheld. The results were spectacular. The weight losses varied from person to person, as did the time required for each to reach his goal. But, averaged out, each dieter lost twenty-two pounds in slightly more than three months.
This time public imagination was captured. Holiday magazine ran a series of articles discussing the du Pont project, and for a time the so-called Holiday Diet became a household word. In principle, this was a controlled-carbohydrate diet, but in practice the high-protein, high-fat regimen offered so many calories per day that it was still impossible for most people to believe it would work. The medical directors of the project knew, and had proved, that when carbohydrate was not present the body would burn fat instead.
However, in the years that followed, so much significant research had been recorded by so many authoritative investigators that it is no longer possible to dismiss the low carbohydrate diet as interesting but freakish. At Middlesex Hospital in London, a team headed by Professor Alan Kekwick and biochemist Dr. G. L. D. S. Pawan undertook an intensive study of diet involving both obese and non-obese subjects, the results of which have had enormous impact on weight-control theory. They found that obese patients would lose weight even on comparatively high calorie diets so long as the calories consisted chiefly of protein and fat, and the carbohydrates were kept to a minimum. They also concluded that on a fat and protein diet, low in carbohydrate, the body would derive its nutritional requirements from the food which it was given.
This is a skimming of the research bloodlines behind the low carbohydrate diet. The serious student with time to invest and desire to know more can find a mountain of relevant material at his nearest library. The serious dieter needs only to start cutting carbohydrates: he will lose weight. |
