"Mr Banting was a fat man. At age sixty-five, the five-foot five Banting weighted in at over two hundred pounds.
'I could not stoop to tie my shoe...nor attend to the little offices humanity requires without considerable pain and difficulty, which only the corpulent can understand,' he wrote.
"Banting was recently retired...had no family history of obesity, nor did he consider himself either lazy, inactive, or given to excessive indulgence at the table.
"Nonetheless, corpulence had crept up on him in his thirties, as with many of us today, despite his best efforts. He took up daily rowing and gained muscular vigor, a prodigious appetite, and yet more weight.
"He cut back on calories, which failed to induce weight loss but did leave him exhausted and beset by boils. He tried walking, riding horseback, and manual labor. His weight increased. He consulted the best doctors... He tried purgatives and diuretics. His weight increased..."
How Mr. Banting Lost 35 lbs in 8 months even though he drank a lot of alcohol.
"He cut back on calories, which failed to induce weight loss but did leave him exhausted and beset by boils. He tried walking, riding horseback, and manual labor. His weight increased. He consulted the best doctors... He tried purgatives and diuretics. His weight increased..." (from Part I)
"Luckily for Banting, he consulted a surgeon who had recently been to Paris. The doctor had just heard the great physiologist Claude Bernard lecture on diabetes.
The liver, reported Bernard, secretes glucose, the substance of both sugar and starch. It was this glucose that accumulates excessively in the bloodstream of diabetics. It struck him that "a diet of only meat and dairy would check the secretion of sugar in the urine of a diabetic."
Banting's surgeon immediately formulated a dietary regimen for Banting. Namely, "complete abstinence from sugars and starches."
After all, wrote the doctor, we know that to fatten up animals, "a saccharine (sugar) and farinaceous (flour) diet is used." He thought "excessive obesity might be allied to diabetes as to its cause...and if a purely animal diet were useful in the latter disease, a combination of animal food with a vegetable diet that contained neither sugar nor starch might...arrest the undue formation of fat."
So here's the regime Banting followed for the next year:
"He ate three meals a day of meat fish, or game, usually five or six ounces at a meal, with one or two stale toast or cooked fruit on the side. He had his evening tea with a few more ounces of fruit or stale toast. He scrupulously avoided any other food that might contain either sugar or starch, in particular bread, milk, beer, sweets and potatoes."
"Despite a considerable allowance of alcohol in Banting's regimen - four or five glasses of wine each day, a cordial every morning, and an evening tumbler of gin, whisky or brandy - Banting dropped thirty-five pounds by the following May (eight months later) and fifty pounds by early the next year.
"I have not felt better in health than now for the last twenty-six years,' he wrote. 'My other bodily ailments have become mere matters of history.'"
- Taubes, 2007
That was 1864. Banting's 16 page (free) Letter on corpulence, Addressed to the Public, launched the world's first popular diet craze. Within a year, Banting "had entered the English language as a verb meaning 'to diet.'"
If someone is "gouty obese, and nervous, we strongly recommend him to 'bant'" suggested the Pall Mall Gazette in June, 1865. - Taubes, 2007
Guess how the medical community of the day reacted? Some, writes Taubes,
"did what members of established societies often do when confronted with a radical new concept: they attacked both the message and the messenger. The Lancet, (like today's Newsweek), first whined that Banting's diet was old news. Second...that his diet could be dangerous."
150 years later, some in the medical community raise the same question:
Is a low carb approach safe?
Today we have many modern versions of Banting's low carb diet, most notably Atkins and South Beach. And just this year, Dr. Heidi's ER Fat Burn Program, the very latest in a low carb-based regime, has seen great success among the participants. (One gal dropped 18 pounds in her first four weeks and got her sex drive back(!))
For some people, however, the question remains:
Is a low carb regime dangerous?
Six years after he lost 50 lbs with his low carb regime, Mr. Banting published the fourth edition of his "Letter on corpulence." By then his name had become a verb - 'to bant' meant to diet - by following his published low carb regime. Mr. Banting had kept those 50 lbs off all those years and added that "My other bodily ailments have become mere matters of history."
Still, in 1865 and today, 143 years later, some people ask, "Is low carb dangerous?"
Remember Banting's regime: Mostly meat, fish and fowl and a bit of fruit and veggies and No sugars, no starches, bread, milk, sweets and potatoes.
Few experts disagree with what he stopped eating. It's what he DID eat - the meat - that has caused mild panic in some corners in the past 15 years.
Reason: Meat has "saturated fats" which are thought by some to be associated with heart trouble - you know, clogging of the arteries and such. And since the low-carb regimes recommend eating meats, bacon and similar fare, it was put on the high risk list by these concerned folks.
I am no health expert. I'm just a person extremely interested in health, want to play tennis when I'm 95. And I love to eat good foods. Here's my take:
Let's agree that meat has saturated fat in it. And let's agree also that meat has had saturated fats in it since the beginning of time.
I have three questions for someone who asks: Is a low-carb regime safe - since it's high in saturated fat?
1. Why has saturated fat become a problem now, when our ancestors since the stone age, 2.5 million years ago, survived by eating animals? There was no heart disease reported in the stone age. And we're here, aren't we?
2. Is it possible that the recent association of saturated fat and heart disease might have been off the mark? It wouldn't be the first time we've been wrong about the cause of a problem. The latest and meticulously researched 601-page tome, Good Calories, Bad Calories (journalist Gary Taubes, 2007) has 10 conclusions. Here are the first two:
Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.
The problem is the carbohydrates in the diet, their effect on insulin secretion, and the hormonal regulation of homeostasis - the entire harmonic ensemble of the human body. (p. 454)
3. If it's not the fat, could it be the meat? There were no industrial feedlots in the stone age. No one was force-feeding the animals corn and soy, instead of their natural food source, grass. No one gave them growth hormones and shot them full of antibiotics (because they're mostly sick in the feedlots now, reports Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma), since they cannot digest the corn and soy).
Might part of the resistance to a low carb approach to weight loss be a result of NOT making the bad meat- good meat distinction?
These questions, and my personal wonderful experience being on a real food low carb regime make me say that for me, low-carb is a wonderful, healthful approach to living. The caveat: all food must be real. No highly processed foods, no toxins, no artificial ingredients or any other poisons or chemicals.
P.S. I learned all this (and have become extremely interested in eating and health) because of my old friend, Dr. Heidi. I filmed her university nutrition course in CA this spring.
I am now marketing her ER Fat Burning program because I am betting that it will change your idea of eating- now and for years to come.
Article Source
Real Food with Dr. Heidi Dulay - Little Spa
My Whole Food Nation website. Good Food Making You Fat Video w/Dr. Heidi
Email Robin Here
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