The 183-Year History of the Low-Carb Diet: Losing Weight Without Going Hungry

I want to introduce you to a few of the most effective reducing diets from the past.

While reading about these diets, it is vitally important to remember that the meat and milk that was available when these diets were first designed were very different from the meat and milk currently sold in most stores. These foods originally contained a healthy balance between omega 3 and omega 6 fats, and they contained greater amounts of fat-soluble vitamins.In addition, the availability of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), the special cancer-fighting and fat-busting fatty acid, has almost completely disappeared from the meat and milk available in most grocery stores..

In other words, these foods have lost their medicinal value.

Diet books that are based on the original reducing diets that you'll be reading about below, like the Atkins diet, do not acknowledge the changes that have taken place in our food supply in the last 60 years. The authors assume that the meat eaten by William Banting in 1882 is the same as the meat you buy at supermarkets today. They don't mention that our eggs have lost much of their nutritional value, or that our milk has changed so much it should be called by a different name.

This matters for two very important reasons. First, as mentioned earlier, without the high dosage of vitamins and CLA, and without the correct balance of fats, the meats that form a basis for the new low-carbohydrate diets have lost their medicinal value. They help you lose weight, but they don't correct the underlying imbalance that caused you to gain weight in the first place.

That is probably the reason why most low-carbohydrate diet books suggest that you count carbohydrate grams as closely as you used to count fat grams – and that you do it for the rest of your life.

In this respect, current low-carb diets mimic the standard recommendation of experts who prescribe low-calorie diets. This lifelong restriction, plus the amazing effort it takes to find and purchase specially-processed low-carb food, cause most people to give up the diet sooner or later.

We also know that most of the meat and milk found in supermarkets are low-fat. The magic in a low-carbohydrate diet is in the healthy fat that is eaten instead of the sugar and grain-based foods. It is the fat that reduces the craving for refined sugars and starches, the fat that increases the metabolism, and the fat that re-balances the body's fat and muscle cells.

But today's meat is trimmed of almost all its fat, and today's milk is usually sold as non-fat or reduced fat. Even when supermarket milk is bought as whole milk, it is still missing the vitamins and CLA that are found in unpasteurized milk from grass-fed cows. If you understand the medicinal value of fat from naturally-raised meat and milk and try to base a low-carb diet on supermarket food, a trip to the local store can be quite depressing.

Since most people don't know about these issues, they assume that the magic in a low-carbohydrate is in the protein. They eat lots of meat from the supermarket, with almost no fat, and they give up the diet quickly because it makes them feel sick.

But it is still true that, from the common experience of dieters, and from many published reports, the only diets that have proven to be effective in causing permanent weight loss are also the diets that restrict carbohydrates instead of calories.

These diets do not require the dieter to go hungry. For most of us, that will sound like good news.

It was once common knowledge that anyone with a weight problem should cut back on the sugars and starch.

This idea moved beyond folk knowledge in 1825, when Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote a famous book about food called The Physiology of Taste.

Brillat-Savarin believed that there are two causes of obesity. The first cause is "the natural constitution of the individual." He believed there are "persons whose digestive activities, all things being equal, create more fat than those of their fellows." Modern science has confirmed a genetic tendency in families towards both obesity and diabetes, plus the heart disease that often follows, so Brillat-Savarin was on the right track. (This tendency towards insulin resistance is only a problem for people who eat refined sugars and starch).

He then goes on to say:

The second of the chief causes of obesity is the floury and starchy substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment. As we have said already, all animals that live on farinaceous [starchy] food grow fat willy-nilly; and man is no exception to the universal law.

Starch is no less fattening when conveyed in drinks, such as beer and other beverages of the same kind…
Obesity brings with it distaste for dancing, walking, and riding, and an inaptitude for every occupation or amusement requiring some degree of agility or skill.

It also opens the way for various diseases, such as apoplexy [internal bleeding, or stroke], dropsy [edema], and ulcers of the legs, and makes all other ailments more difficult to cure.

Recent studies have proven that sugar and refined starch lock up fuel and nutrients so the body cannot use them, and this causes lethargy and fatigue - so we do become less active and less interested in life when we eat sugar and refined starch. It has also been proven that obesity and diabetes can lead to a number of other illnesses, such as heart disease, ulcers, sleep apnea, etc., and that overweight people do catch colds and other common illnesses more often.

Although many doctors have been blaming dietary fat for obesity and heart disease in the last 60 years, Brillat-Savarin specifically mentioned, back in 1825, that sugar and starch were far more fattening than dietary fat

Here is something that we should remember:

While Brillat-Savarin was observing which foods were enjoyed by people with different waistlines, the sugar and white flour that he blamed for obesity had been common staples in the British pantry for less than 50 years.

It made sense for him to blame the new foods for the new problem of obesity.

On the other hand, when scientists were frantically looking for the cause of a drastic increase in heart disease in the 1960s and 70s, our diets were already filled with processed foods of all kinds, and had been for a very long time. There were probably no scientists working at that time who could remember living without refined carbohydrate foods at every meal. By then, these products were considered a 'normal' part of a well-balanced diet.

So in 1970, there were no 'new' foods to blame the heart disease epidemic on, so scientists blamed one of our oldest traditional foods, saturated fats from meat and milk. This was partly because they found cholesterol in clogged arteries, and assumed the cholesterol had caused the disease. This theory has never been proven, and many respected scientists now believe it is incorrect.

The second reason for warning against dietary fats is because fat has more calories per gram than protein or carbohydrates. Evidently, it was assumed by most obesity experts that we stop eating only when there is a large enough quantity of food in our stomach. This has also been disproved – dietary fat is a natural appetite suppressant, while dietary sugar and refined starch are appetite stimulants.

After World War II, many new industrially-processed foods were invented to replace the saturated fats that humans have been eating for millions of years. Scientists and doctors praised the new vegetable oils, hydrogenated oils, and soy proteins that were expected to save us from the heart disease epidemic. Even today they continue to praise these foods, even though we've now been eating them in large quantities for many years, and the obesity, heart disease and diabetes rates continue to rise.

Meanwhile, under the radar, many people continued to believe that the old-fashioned culprits - sugar and white flour - were really to blame, and that the common-sense approach to weight loss is to cut back or eliminate these products from the diet. Many scientific studies have proven they're right, even though these studies are generally ignored by most doctors. You can read a complete review of these studies in Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, a book I highly recommend.

A short history of low-carb diets:

In 1882 an eye, ear and nose doctor named William Harvey became famous by curing a patient of his obesity. His patient, William Banting, wrote a wildly popular pamphlet describing what is often considered the first low-carb diet.

Banting's physician theorized that excess weight and diabetes may be different manifestations of the same syndrome. As it turns out, this theory turned out to be correct. The syndrome has been variously called the saccharine disease, Syndrome X, insulin resistance syndrome, and most recently metabolic syndrome. Harvey told Banting to cut back on the sugars and starches, and the new diet did wonders for Banting's health.

In his pamphlet, Banting described his normal eating habits before his diet:

My former dietary table was bread and milk for breakfast, or a pint of tea with plenty of milk, sugar, and buttered toast; meat, beer, much bread (of which I was always very fond) and pastry for dinner, the meal of tea similar to that of breakfast, and generally a fruit tart or bread and milk for supper. I had little comfort and far less sound sleep.

In other words, Banting ate almost nothing but carbohydrates. This is very much like a college student's diet of Top Ramen, donuts and beer.

The thing to note in Banting's diet was that he did not give up all carbohydrate foods, but did eat far less bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes than he had consumed before his diet. At that time, it was believed that butter contained sugar, (and the milk available in London and other large cities was not very healthy. We'll discuss this in more detail in a few weeks).

As you'll see, Banting still ate rather well:

6 ounces of meat or fish for breakfast, along with a large cup of tea or coffee, a little biscuit (which is probably what we Yanks would call a 'cookie'), and a slice of toast without butter.
Lunch was made up of 5 or 6 ounces of meat or fish, any vegetable except the starchiest ones, a slice of bread, and some cooked fruit, some poultry or game, and two or three glasses of good claret, sherry or Madeira.
Tea time brought more cooked fruit, a few more lightly sweetened cookies, (rusks), and a cup of tea.
For supper, he ate more meat, a few more glasses of claret or sherry;
And he ended the day with a nightcap of a spot of gin, whiskey or brandy or a glass or two of claret or sherry.

Banting basically stopped eating sweetened desserts, potatoes, and most of the bread that he was used to eating. He now ate meat, poultry or fish instead of the pastries and much of the bread. And he gave up beer, although he still enjoyed a surprising amount of alcohol. Calories were not restricted, and Banting said he was never hungry.

The diet worked – he lost most of his excess weight and cured himself of many of his ailments. He describes his new health:

I have not felt better in health than now for the last twenty-six years.
Have suffered no inconvenience whatever in the probational remedy or since.
Am reduced nearly 13 inches in bulk, and 50 lbs. in weight.
Can perform every necessary office for myself.
The umbilical rupture is cured.
My sight and hearing are surprising at my age.
My other bodily ailments have become mere matters of history.

Banting's description of his futile attempts to find a doctor who could help him, until he finally stumbled upon Dr. Harvey almost by accident, is remarkably familiar to the experiences of Richard Morris, 125 years later.

Morris is the author of A Life Unburdened, Getting Over Weight and Getting On With My Life.

At one time Morris, a software specialist, weighed over 400 pounds. Like Banting, he sought treatment from a number of specialists and followed their advice with great care, but continued to gain weight until he discovered the cause of his obesity – refined sugars and starch, and industrially processed foods.

When they stopped dieting and changed to the traditional foods suggested by Weston Price, Morris lost over 150 pounds, and his wife lost 50 pounds. Many of their aches and pains went away with their weight. They now buy only naturally-raised meat and milk, fresh vegetables, and traditionally-processed grains – all the things you're learning about in this 16 week course.

Morris' book is truly inspiring, and deserves a much wider readership.

Morris' experience proves present-day obesity can be conquered using a diet similar to Banting's, as long as no industrialized foods are eaten. That means taking the trouble to find naturally-raised meat, eggs and milk, ignoring all the boxed convenience foods in the supermarket, and rarely eating dinner out. When you face the prospect of endless daily pain and a probable early death, as Morris did, the extra effort is worth it. Since Morris had an 8-year old daughter who was already struggling with a weight problem, he had even more incentive to make the change to real food.

Morris and his family will need to avoid processed foods forever if they want to stay healthy, but they enjoy the old-fashioned flavor and satisfaction from their new diet so much that they should never be tempted to go back to the old, unhealthy industrialized diet. When there is no suffering or deprivation, staying on a healthy diet is easy.

After Banting…

About 40 years or so after the publication of Banting's pamphlet, two doctors designed much more restrictive low-carbohydrates in order to reduce a patient's weight quickly.

These restrictive diets were not intended to be followed permanently. Patients went on a 'normal' diet (with some restrictions), as soon as the excess weight was lost. (Back then, if you didn't eat anything made of flour or sugar, you were automatically on a real food diet, because the world had not yet seen the explosion of experimental, laboratory-invented food products like hydrolyzed soy protein and hydrogenated oil.)

Dr. Donaldson's reducing diet was a landlubber's version of the Inuit diet studied in detail by an Arctic explorer named Vilhjalmur Stefanson. The diet used by Dr. J. R. Crewe, one of the founders of the Mayo Clinic, was loosely based on the traditional diet of the Maasai and other herding cultures of East Africa.

Let's take a look at the diets designed by these two highly respected doctors.

Blake Donaldson's 3-Pound a Week Diet
Dr. Blake F. Donaldson first began working on the problem of obesity in 1919, when he worked with cardiac patients at the New York Post Graduate Medical School and Hospital. At first, he followed the standard practice of prescribing a low-calorie diet to these patients. He said in his memoirs Strong Medicine that:

At the end of a year a brief survey of clinic patients on low-calorie diets showed that the results were something worse than terrible.

It should be noted that many current obesity specialists complain of similar results, but most of them blame the patients for the failure of the low-calorie diets they prescribe. Donaldson was more creative than that, and started looking for something that could actually help his patients.

He talked to the curators at the American Museum of Natural History, where he was told that primitive humans ate diets made up almost exclusively from the fattest meat they could catch, along with some fruit and roots. (Recent studies have shown that catching animals was not that hard for hunter-gatherer tribes. The few remaining traditional cultures who still keep their hunter-gatherer lifestyle only work a few hours a day, and eat quite well.)

At about that same time, Donaldson also made the acquaintance of the famous explorer and anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefanson, who wrote a popular book about his years living with Inuit hunters, called The Friendly Arctic.

Stefanson ate nothing but meat during his five years with the Inuit, but when he published his book about his experiences he encountered a great deal of skepticism from the medical community. Doctors simply couldn't believe that 'civilized' people could survive without carbohydrates in the diet, in spite of the fact that people in the Arctic have been doing it for several thousand years.

To calm the skepticism, Stefanson volunteered for a year-long meat-only diet experiment, conducted at New York's Bellevue hospital. When the year-long experiment was over, Stefanson and his fellow volunteer were examined carefully by doctors, and they found that neither man suffered any ill effects from a diet containing no vegetables or grains. Stefanson lost the 10 pounds he had gained after returning from the Arctic, although there was never any restriction on the amount of calories he was allowed to eat.

The experiment also confirmed something that Stefanson had learned while living with the Inuit – that lean meat alone, without the fat, would make someone violently sick within days. The fat was needed to digest the lean.

Donaldson decided to see if his obese cardiac patients could lose weight eating the way Stefanson did during the Bellevue experiment. Because he knew patients had a hard time following complicated orders, he reduced the diet to the basics, with no options or choices allowed. It consisted of three meals, each consisting of at least 8 ounces of unsalted fatty meat, and a half-cup of black coffee. Patients were allowed to eat as much fatty meat as they wanted, but they could eat no less than 8 ounces (weighed after cooking) at each meal. Approximately 80% of the calories came from fat. Salt was restricted because 'it put out the fire' and slowed the weight loss. Donaldson found that the coffee actually slowed down the weight loss, but that he couldn’t convince his patients to go on the diet if they also had to give up caffeine.

The diet worked for hundreds of Donaldson's patients. They lost 3 pounds a week, like clockwork, until they reached their ideal weight. Donaldson called the fatty acids in the meat 'strong medicine.'

Donaldson kept his patients on this diet only until they reached their ideal weight, and he had a surprising test to make sure the patient was really as thin as they needed to be. He would determine an estimated ideal weight in advance, based on height and bone structure. Let's say, for instance, that he believed an overweight woman should weight 136 pounds. He would mark the calendar for the day when she should reach this weight, at 3 pounds a week. When that day came, he would allow the patient to add a small potato and some cooked fruit to her meals.

If the patient immediately gained a pound or two after eating the potatoes and fruit, Donaldson put her back on the fatty-meat-only diet for several more weeks. Then, perhaps when the patient was down to 130 pounds, they tested again with the additional food. If the weight stayed even, the patient was now at her body's ideal weight. She then moved off the Inuit-inspired diet to a more traditional diet for an American, but still based on foods that Donaldson called 'primitive.' He wanted his patients to completely avoid any food product that was not part of a traditional diet.

During the reducing diet and afterwards, calories were not counted – Donaldson was relying on the medicinal power of the fat, not starvation, to help his patients lose weight. However, he did ask his diabetic patients to never again eat anything made from flour, either whole-wheat or white, and to give up beer.

I'm guessing here, but it is probably that the conjugated linoleic acid in the naturally-raised fatty meat not only caused excess body fat to be burned off more quickly, but it also caused a reduction in the number of fat cells and increased in the number of muscle cells, as recent studies show that CLA can do. When the proper balance was achieved between fat and muscle cells, Donaldson's patients were able to regulate their own weight on a normal diet, as long as they refrained from the refined carbohydrates that had caused the problem in the first place.

It appears that the genetic tendency towards insulin resistance, which Brillat-Savarin had recognized many years earlier, would still cause problems unless his patients avoided grain-based foods, including bread and beer. Since New York bakeries at that time did not use the traditional preparation methods that we'll be discussing in a later lesson, there is no way to know if his patients could have eaten bread and cereals if the anti-nutrients in the seeds had been unlocked by soaking or sprouting. Only a carefully controlled scientific study (or personal experimentation) can tell us that for sure.

It also seems to be apparent that the same therapeutic results would not be obtained if the diet was carried out using today's factory-raised beef. Studies would need to be done to prove this one way or another. However, this is the only reason I can see for why Banting was able to simply reduce (but not eliminate) the carbs in his diet, but current low-carb diet books insist that people must stay away from starchy vegetables and fruits forever.

Perhaps someday we'll see some good, solid research to explain this better. For now, my 'diet foods' are grass-fed beef and whole, raw milk.

If you'd like to know how to use natural whole foods to suppress your appetite naturally, curb your cravings for fattening foods, and lose weight permanently, visit my new sit at www.CravingControlDiet.com

Jonni Good is the author of most of the original articles on this site. Jonni always looks for the easy way to solve common health problems, by working with human nature. Her books have helped hundreds of people lose weight, get fit, and regain their health - with less struggle. Please take a moment to visit her other sites:

Do You Gain Weight... Even when you eat less than your thinner friends? Learn why it happens, and how to use nutritious, satisfying food to break the metabolic pattern that causes some people to gain weight too easily.

Sugar Cravings and Addiction – Describes a simple program to help people break their addiction to sugar and fat. This book has been popular ever since it came out in 2003, and has helped hundreds of people lose their cravings for sugar and other simple carbs. Once the cravings are under control, it's easier to stick with your diet and regain your health.

Weight Lifting for Absolute Beginners – A guide to lifting weights for strong muscles and bones.

The Easy-Does-It Diet – A guide to creating your own delicious and healthy frozen diet meals. Eat healthy, low-fat meals without paying extra for store-bought frozen diet food.

Disclaimer: This site and the articles contained here are for information purposes only. The authors have made every effort to make sure the information is accurate, but no health decisions should ever be made based on this or any other website. Please contact your doctor before starting any diet or exercise program.