not true.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the famed arctic explorer, did the original
research on this type of diet using himself as a guinea pig.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson spent quite a while with Inuit eskimos eating
nothing but their usual diet of fresh meat.

why does sci.med.nutrition need a resident shill for the weston price
foundation?

When one thinks of low-carbohydrate diets today, one tends to think
that they are "new" or "revolutionary" in some way.

-- Like the "King of Con", Adkins.

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 was the best way to lose
weight.

-- A diet that causes you to lose weight doesn't necessarily = a
healthy diet.

<snip>

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."

-- And it continues to rise despite low-carb.

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.

-- The bullshit meter just went off.

-- How has calorie intake gone down when every damn thing now days is
"supersized"?

-- LOL  'Exercise clubs are a factor in the obesity epidemic'  Now THAT
is a good one!!!

More people are cutting calories now than ever before in their history
yet more of them are becoming overweight.

-- LOL  Sure they are.  Yeah, they're really cutting calories.
Stuffing themselves at buffet tables, pigging down larger and larger
portion sizes, constant snacking on junk food, guzzling soda and
"sports drinks" like they're a replacement for water.  Yeah, they're
cutting calories alright.

There is now a pandemic of increasing weight across the industrialized
world.

-- Note "industrialized world".  With more and more machinery people
have to do less and less manual labor.  People drive everywhere instead
of walk, real manual labor jobs are shrinking and the ones that remain
are given to migrant workers (because no one wants to do them) etc...
hell, who doesn't have a remote on their TV?  Can't do without one of
those... don't want to get my fat a.s off the couch to turn a channel.

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 and 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!

-- Oh, stop it... what this this a comedy bit?  Yeah, bad 'ol exercise
causes you to get fat.  Please tell me no one believes this crap?!

He was then 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 six pounds in all that time, and had less and
less energy.

-- Nice touch.  Linking low-calorie with starvation.  And again,
demonizing exercise.  Yeah, let's foster the notion that it's good to
be a slug and avoid ever getting any sweat on your brow... un-freaking
believeable!

<snipped the bad news about exercise and the sob story about his
medical condition>

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 pounds and, by the following August, 156
pounds.

He had, he says, "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 was told, contained starch and saccharine
matter tending to create fat and were to be avoided altogether. When
told what he could not eat Banting thought that he had very little left
to live on. His kind friend 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
led to an excellent night's rest with 6 to 8 hours' sleep per night.

-- 6-8 hours is a little light on sleep, but whatever...

Fortunately for us today, Banting was quite a remarkable man. It is for
this reason alone that we can know today what this miraculous diet was.
In May 1863, at his own expense, Banting published the first edition of
his now famous Letter on Corpulence in which he tells us of Harvey's
diet plan (see below).

On this diet Banting lost nearly 1 pound 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."

He went on: "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 pounds in weight and 12 1/4
inches off his waist. He suffered no inconvenience whatsoever 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 other bodily ailments were ameliorated and
passed into the matter of history.

-- And I conclude his improved health was the result of no longer
eating butter and drinking milk and beer.  C'mon, what sort of proof is
this whacked-out story?

Banting's Diet Prior to 1862
BREAKFAST: Bread and milk, or a pint of tea with plenty of milk and
sugar, buttered toast.
DINNER: meat, beer, much bread (of which he had always been fond) and
pastry.
TEA: a meal similar to breakfast.
SUPPER: generally a fruit tart or bread and milk.

Harvey's Diet Plan
BREAKFAST: 4-5 ounces beef, mutton, kidneys, broiled fish, bacon or
cold meat of any kind except pork,1 a large cup of tea (without milk or
sugar), a little biscuit or one ounce of dry toast.
DINNER: 5-6 ounces of any fish except salmon, any meat except pork, any
vegetable except potato, one ounce of dry toast, fruit of any pudding,2
any kind of poultry or game, and 2-3 glasses of good claret, sherry or
Madeira (champagne, port, beer were forbidden).
TEA: 2-3 ounces fruit, a rusk or two and a cup of tea without milk or
sugar.
SUPPER: 3-4 ounces of meat or fish, similar to dinner, with a glass or
two of claret.
NIGHTCAP:Tumbler of grog: gin, whisky or brandy (without sugar) or a
glass or two of claret or sherry.

-- What a diet!  You'll feel better because you'll be drunk half the
day.

-- And bad ol' potatos... demonized like eggs were in the 80s...

1. Pork was not allowed as it was thought then that it contained
starch.
2. Banting was not allowed the pastry.

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."

-- The happy ending.  Alcohol, fatty foods, and lying around all day
wins out over the dreaded eating of a variety of healthy foods and
exercising.  Beautiful, now I have justification to not change anything
or get off my butt.  I love it!

<snipped more happy stuff>

"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.

-- It is "miraculous"... love that term.  That word should remind you
to remember 'if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is".

-- And too bad this guy still isn't around.  He'd be perfect to pitch
one of those late-night diet plan infomercials.

-- <snipped about how nice a person he was>

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."

-- Yep, science is bad, too.  It's much better to believe testimonials.

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.

-- LOL.  What a quack!

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.

-- First, it's miraculous, now it's "enshrined in history".   LOL

-- Again, "slimming diets" does not mean healthy diets.

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.

-- Hey, I still say is was the lack of butter and pork that improved
his health.  But I guess it depends on whoever is interpeting the
"data"/story.

-- <Snipped the propeganda>

But it was not to be. Dieticians just couldn't seem to get their heads
round the concept that eating what looked like a high-calorie diet
could possibly be effective for weight loss. Or, perhaps they were
afraid to lose face by admitting that they had been wrong. So they
continued, myopically, to recommend that if you were overweight, it was
your own fault -you were eating too much or not taking enough
exercise, or both.

-- Yeah, it can't be that stuffing your face and being a lazy slob
would have any effect.  I mean it can't be MY fault.

That made life very easy for the dietician while it ruined the life of
the patient. By the late 1970s fat was getting a bad name as a cause of
heart disease (quite incorrectly as we now know).

-- What is this guy smoking?

Now fat was banned for other health reasons and carbohydrates were
advocated even more strongly. Which is why, at the start of the 21st
Century, at a time when most of us are dieting, are eating fewer
calories and less fat, and taking more exercise than ever before in our
history, we are getting fatter than ever before in our history.

-- "Diet plans" galore (including low-carb), supersizing, calling a
walk through WalMart exercise, and we're getting fatter than ever
before in our history.  Go figure.

It is no coincidence that obesity is sky-rocketing today-healthy
eating advises a high-carbohydrate, lowfat diet. The exact opposite of
Banting's diet.

-- Healthy eating advises a wide variety of whole grains, fresh fruits
& vegetables, lean meats & dairy, nuts & seeds, spices and plenty of
water.

-- What a fairy tale story... about as believeable as the Snow White
and Seven Dwarfs.   C'mon people, follow the science and stay away from
these kooky stories.  

Patrick

TC complains and whines as usual:

No need ever to read something from TC.  All he ever does is whine like
a stuck pig. :(