Open Future Health

William Banting:
Letter on Corpulence

Banting is famous in England for writing the first dietary guide for the English public.

Good News: Even in 1862 doctors in Europe and a few people in England knew how to lose weight. Which is surprising, because Local FileBritish farmers all knew how to make livestock fat. The same principles apply.

Banting understood very well that exercise does little to help you lose weight. Banting spent hours rowing on the River Thames, without success. He also tried fasting.

It's amazing how Banting's experience is repeated today. You have a weight problem: "Eat less and exercise more." If that doesn't work very well. "You need to try harder." Is that 150 years of progress?

The BANTING secret is to NEVER be HUNGRY.

UndertakerIn 1862. William Banting visited noted surgeon William Harvey, about his excessive weight.

Banting had tried everything commonly suggested in his day. Exercise, fasting, purgatives, restricting his calories, and nothing worked.

Harvey prescribed a diet he had heard about in France. The recommended diet was mainstream medicine in Europe, but not yet in the UK.

It worked so well that, in 1864, Banting published a 16 page pamphlet, WWW Link"Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public," describing the diet and his experience using it.

Banting's Diet.

Meat, fish, and poultry, with limited animal and dairy fat. (No salmon, no pork.)

Small portions of low sugar fruits, and small pieces of toast.

Zero, sugar, sweets, or starchy foods. No beer.

Wine and spirits were allowed.

The Banting Diet

The Banting Diet is named after William Banting, a prominent English undertaker who lived in the 19th century. The Englishman’s self-published work, "Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public" was the world’s first dieting book and documented the diet that led to his dramatic weight loss.

WWW LinkThe Real Meal Revolution has used advances in nutrition and medical understanding since then, to design a modern diet, firmly based on scientific research about human nutrition.

It is very important to understand WHY Local Filethe Banting Diet should exist at all. The Real Meal Revolution, discusses insulin resistance (IR) and the Local Filemetabolic syndrome (MS) in great in detail.

Left unchecked, IR and MS lead to Local FileType 2 Diabetes Mellitus, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease and obesity among other things. Banting was developed specifically to combat these symptoms.

Dr Wilhelm Ebstein

Scientist
Dr Wilhelm Ebstein
Photo Credit: Nicola Perscheid -
http://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/images/B07739

Adoption of Banting's Diet

Banting's diet was included in the medical text-book "The Principles and Practice of Medicine," by Sir William Osler, then a physician at Johns Hopkins (1892). Osler learned about the diet from the German physician Dr Wilhelm Ebstein and took it back to the USA.

WWW Link Dr Wilhelm Ebstein's research in the 1880's was critical. He studied obesity, diabetes and gout, as a scientist, and identified the importance of including fat in the diet.

Wilhelm Ebstein, is really the scientific father of the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, after realising that the key was replacing carbohydrates with fat, not protein, as fat reduced hunger more effectively. Ebstein (20 years after Banting) was highly critical of Banting's diet, as being too low in fat and high in protein for anyone to want to consume long-term. He believed that restriction of fat was unnecessary, as fat in a carbohydrate-restricted diet did not contribute to adiposity and instead, by increasing satiety and supporting overall health, contributed to weight loss.

German and Austrian scientists were the leading researchers in nutritional science in the world until WWII. After the war, their knowledge was ignored and led by American propaganda and political decisions, nutrition was over-taken by a non-scientific fad focused on reducing saturated fat in the diet. This idea never had any scientific basis.

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