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William Banting: author of the first low-carb diet book
The following article was awarded the Sophie Coe Prize at the 2002 Oxford Symposium on Food History (aka the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking). The Symposium was held at St Antony's College, Oxford, over the weekend 7 and 8 September 2002.
The Prize, in memory of Sophie Coe, the distinguished food historian who died in 1994, is awarded annually under the auspices of the Oxford Symposium for an essay or article on some aspect of food history, embodying new research or providing new insights.
Summary
For two decades 'healthy eating' propaganda has influenced the way we eat. Over
the same period there has been a consequent dramatic rise in obesity and
associated conditions. This has led to a backlash which has seen a rash of diet
books advocating high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets described as 'new' and
'revolutionary'.
But in reality, they are not. The first low-carbohydrate diet book was written
in 1863 by William Banting as a service to his fellow Man. His name passed into
the language as the verb 'to bant'.
That the 'Banting diet' works has been attested to by 140 years of
epidemiological studies and clinical trials.
For the sake of our health, it is time we started 'banting' again.
WILLIAM BANTING:
The Father of the Low-Carbohydrate Diet
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. I started eating
a low-carbohydrate diet in 1962 when a doctor advised me that this the best way
to lose weight. 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.
William Banting (1797-1878)
Only three men in history have been immortalised 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 65, William Banting weighed 202 lbs (14st 6 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 recognised 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.
Banting was so pleased with his progress that on top of Harvey's fees, he gave
the doctor £50 to be distributed amongst Harvey's favourite hospitals.
Although, despite this, he still felt deeply obligated in a way that he could
never hope to repay.
But in 1868, Banting published a prospectus and started a fund to found and
endow a new institution for the service of humanity — the Middlesex
County Convalescent Hospital.
It was to be for those working-class people who could not afford to convalesce
but had to return to work to make ends meet thus allowing no time to get over
their hospital ordeal and so succumbed to relapses.
There was a small home at Walton on Thames which, although small, was, he
thought, possibly sufficient for the purpose. Banting estimated that £12,000
per year was needed to run it.
Banting put up £500, his son £100 and two other members of his family a further
£50; with other patrons he raised a total of £5,000.
Banting charged nothing for the first two editions of his book — he
didn't want the accused of doing it merely for profit. He had printed 1,000
copies of the first edition and he gave them away.
The second edition numbered 1,500 which he also gave away although they cost
him 6d each. Copies of the third edition, still in 1863, were sold at 1/- each.
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 centre 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 criticised solely on the grounds that it was 'unscientific'.
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. 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.
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.
Banting, who lived in physical comfort and remained at a normal weight until
his death in 1878 at the age of 81, always maintained that Dr. Niemeyer's
altered diet was far inferior to the one that had so changed his life.
Not long after Banting's Letter on Corpulence was published the verb 'to bant'
entered the language and people losing weight said they were 'banting'. It
remained in common parlance well into the Twentieth Century and one still hears
it occasionally today.
A friend of mine, Jan Freden, of Uppsala, Sweden, tells me that in Sweden
today, 'banting' is still the word most commonly used for dieting to achieve
weight loss. So, in Sweden:
- 'Att banta' = to bant.
- 'Nej, tack, jag bantar' = No thank you, I am banting.
The Banting diet is confirmed
Banting's Letter on Corpulence travelled widely. In the 1890s, an American
doctor, Emmett Densmore, modelled diets on Banting. He tells how he and his
patients lost an average 10-15 lbs (4.5-6.8 kg) in the first month on the diet
and then 6-8 lbs (2.7-3.6 kg) in subsequent months 'by a diet from which bread,
cereals and starchy food were excluded'. His advice to would-be slimmers was:
'One pound of beef or mutton or fish per day with a moderate amount of the
non-starchy vegetables given above [tomatoes, lettuce, string beans, spinach
and such] will be found ample for any obese person of sedentary habits'.
Dr. Densmore was scathing of those others of his profession who derided
Banting's diet. He says of them: 'Those very specialists who are at this time
prospering greatly by the reduction of obesity and who are indebted to Mr.
Banting for all their prosperity are loud, nevertheless, in their condemnation
of the Banting method'.
Real-life tests
In 1906, Dr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a young Harvard anthropology teacher who
later became a world-famous explorer and anthropologist, revolutionised polar
exploration by crossing the Arctic alone and living off the land with the
Eskimos. It was not quite what had been planned. Stefansson had gone on ahead
of the Leffingwell-Mikkelson Expedition and had missed a planned rendezvous at
Herschel Island. He was left to spend an Arctic winter with the Eskimos eating
a diet composed only of meat and fish. Unlike the diet he had been brought up
on, it contained no plant material whatsoever.
It was a golden opportunity for the young scientist to conduct an experiment
into the effects of an Eskimo diet on a European unaccustomed to it. The usual
Eskimo meal consisted of briefly stewed fish washed down with water. It was so
different from what he was used to that at first Stefansson was repelled by it.
To try to make the fish more palatable, he tried broiling it. This resulted in
his becoming weak and dizzy, with other symptoms of malnutrition. Stefansson
reasoned that with such a restricted diet the body had to have not just the
fish but the other nutrients that had been leached out into the water. And so
he tried harder. Eventually he became so accustomed to the primitive diet that,
by the time he left the Eskimos, Stefansson managed as well as them. On this
regime, Stefansson remained in perfect health and did not get fat.
The experience had a profound effect on Stefansson. Like Banting before him, he
became interested in the possibilities of diets high in proteins and fats and
low in carbohydrates. It seemed to him that a balanced diet in which there was
relatively little meat, 'balanced' by larger amounts of potatoes, bread, rice
and other starchy foods followed by sweet desserts and sugared coffee might be
balanced in the wrong direction. And so, like Banting, Stefansson questioned
the established ideas on diet. Unfortunately, he had no more success than
Banting. Although he became famous and his position as an anthropologist was
unassailable, still no one took any notice of his ideas on nutrition.
Some years after his first experience with the Eskimos, Dr. Stefansson returned
to the Arctic with a colleague, Dr. Karsten Anderson, to carry out research for
the American Museum of Natural History. They were supplied with every necessity
including a year's supply of 'civilised' food. This they declined, electing
instead to live off the land. In the end, the one-year project stretched to
four years, during which time the two men ate only the meat they could kill and
the fish they could catch in the Canadian Arctic. Neither of the two men
suffered any adverse after-effects from their four-year experiment.
It was evident to Stefansson, as it had been to Banting, that the body could
function perfectly well, remain healthy, vigorous and slender if it used a diet
in which as much food was eaten as the body required, only carbohydrate was
restricted and the total number of calories was ignored.
The first clinical dietary trial
In 1928, Stefansson and Anderson entered Bellevue Hospital, New York for a controlled experiment into the effects of an all-meat diet on the body. The committee which was assembled to supervise the experiment was one of the best qualified in medical history, consisting as it did of the leaders of all the branches of science related to the subject. Dr. Eugene F. DuBois, Medical Director of the Russell Sage Foundation (subsequently chief physician at the New York Hospital, and Professor of Physiology at Cornell University Medical College) directed the experiment. The study was designed to find the answers to five questions about which there was some debate:
- Does the withholding of vegetable foods cause scurvy?
- Will an all-meat diet cause other deficiency diseases?
- Will it cause mineral deficiencies, of calcium in particular?
- Will it have a harmful effect on the heart, blood vessels or kidneys?
- Will it promote the growth of harmful bacteria in the gut?
The results of the year-long trial were published in 1930 in the Journal of
Biological Chemistry and showed that the answer to all of the questions was:
no. There were no deficiency problems; the two men remained perfectly healthy;
their bowels remained normal, except that their stools were smaller and did not
smell. The absence of starchy and sugary carbohydrates from their diet appeared
to have only good effects.
Once again, Stefansson discovered that he felt better and was healthier on a
diet that restricted carbohydrates. Only when fats were restricted did he
suffer any problems. During this experiment his intake had varied between 2,000
and 3,100 calories per day and he derived, by choice, an average of eighty
percent of his energy from animal fat and the other twenty percent from protein.
One interesting finding from a heart disease perspective was that Stefansson's
blood cholesterol level fell by 1.3 mmol/l while on the all-meat diet, rising
again at the end of the study when he resumed a 'normal' diet.
But the published results had little effect on the people trying to lose weight
in 1930. A diet that allowed as much meat as one could eat and also allowed a
large proportion of fat must contain lots of calories. To the average slimmer,
lots of calories meant putting on weight.
The evidence mounts
In 1933, a clinical study carried out at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh studied
the effects of low- and high-calorie diets, ranging from 800 to 2,700 kcals.
Average daily losses:
- high carb/low fat diet - 49g [like a modern slimming diet]
- high carb/low protein - 122g
- low carb/high protein - 183g
- low carbohydrate/high fat - 205g
Drs Lyon and Dunlop pointed out that:
'The most striking feature of the table is that the losses appear to be inversely proportionate to the carbohydrate content of the food. Where the carbohydrate intake is low the rate of loss in weight is greater and conversely.'
In other words, the less carbohydrate was eaten, the greater was the amount of
weight lost.
In 1955 Dr Albert Pennington in the USA also found that: 'weight loss appeared
to be inversely related to the amount of glycogenic materials in the diet.
Carbohydrate is 100 per cent, protein 58 per cent and fat 10 per cent
glycogenic.' (In other words, the more a food increased insulin production, the
less weight was lost — and in this respect, to lose weight, again
carbohydrate was worst and fat best.)
Pennington continued: 'The recommended diet is a calorically unrestricted one,
very low in carbohydrate, high in fat and moderate in protein. Neither fat nor
protein is restricted, however.'
Pennington's diet was so successful that it was reported in Holiday magazine,
where it became known as 'The Holiday Diet'.
Professor Alan Kekwick and Dr Gaston Pawan had similar results: In a trial at
the Middlesex Hospital, London, overweight patients:
- lost the most weight on a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet
- lost the least weight on a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet
- Lost weight even at 2,600 calories a day — but only on a high-fat diet.
In 1959, Dr John Yudkin, Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics, Queen Elizabeth
Hospital, University of London, confirmed Kekwick and Pawan's findings when he
showed that a diet with unlimited protein and fat, but with little or no
carbohydrate was far more effective in causing weight loss than a
calorie-controlled, low-fat diet.
During the 1950s, another British physician, Dr Richard Mackarness, found that
the low-carb, high-fat diet was so successful with his overweight patients that
he wrote a book that was in print for nearly twenty years — a feat almost
unheard of in the slimming book industry. It was Dr Mackarness who introduced
this concept to me in 1962 and so dramatically changed the lives of my family
and me. In the forty years since, none of my family has been overweight,
although we were before that date.
As time passed and praising the value of fat became politically incorrect, it
became more difficult to get such trials published. Nevertheless, it did happen
occasionally.
Published in the year 2000, a prospective study was conducted to evaluate the
effect of a low carbohydrate, high-protein/fat diet in achieving short-term
weight loss. Researchers at the Center for Health Services Research in Primary
Care, Durham, North Carolina, reported data from a six-month study that
included fifty-one individuals who were overweight, but otherwise healthy. The
subjects received nutritional supplements and attended bi-weekly group
meetings, where they received dietary counselling on consuming a
low-carbohydrate, high-protein/fat diet. After six months, they had lost, on
average, more than ten percent of their weight and (remember this for later)
their total cholesterol dropped by an average 10.5 mg/dl (0.27 mmol/l).
Twenty patients chose to continue the diet after the first six months, and
after twelve months, their mean weight loss was 10.9 percent and their total
cholesterol had decreased by 14.1 mg/dl (0.37 mmol/l).
Dr William S. Yancy, M.D. admitted that:
'This study of overweight individuals showed that a low carbohydrate, high-protein/fat diet can lead to significant weight loss at one year of treatment.'
All these recommendations and evidence could have saved a great deal of grief, trauma and ill-health if two other doctors had been listened to in 1994. Writing in the British Medical Journal, Professor Susan Wooley and Dr David Gardner highlighted the role of the professional in people's increasing weight. They said:
'The failure of fat people to achieve a goal they seem to want — and to want above all else — must now be admitted for what it is: a failure not of those people but of the methods of treatment that are used.'
In other words, blaming the overweight for their problem and telling them they are eating too much and must cut down, is simply not good enough. It is the dieticians' advice and the treatment offered that are wrong. Wooley and Garner concluded:
'We should stop offering ineffective treatments aimed at weight loss. Researchers who think they have invented a better mousetrap should test it in controlled research before setting out their bait for the entire population. Only by admitting that our treatments do not work — and showing that we mean it by refraining from offering them — can we begin to undo a century of recruiting fat people for failure.'
But of course there is a 'better mousetrap'. William Banting wrote of it nearly a century and a half ago.
Last updated 1 October 2002