The Banting Diet as Taught by Experts
What is Banting?
Banting is a low-carbohydrate, high-fat (LCHF) diet, named after William Banting, the first person in England to write about it.
The team at The Real Meal Revolution prefer this definition. "Banting: The diet used to treat the symptoms of insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome."
"A diet comprising no more than 50g of carbohydrate per day (net), while consuming only good-quality fats and no seed oils." So a Banting diet aims to keep you in nutritional ketosis.
"Humans need real food. Our bodies were designed to eat real food. If we feed our bodies food that they weren't designed to eat, they're going to react in ways that they weren't designed for."
Get Started
I made the mistake of reading too much and doing too little at the start. Getting the direction of your dietary change right is more important than doing it exactly correctly. So it can be really simple.
Severely reduce the carbohydrate in your diet.
Eliminate, sugar, bread, cakes, biscuits, pasta, potatoes, and rice from your diet. (These are the main carbohydrates.)
Eat meats, fish, eggs, dairy foods and vegetables, especially green vegetables.
Be happy to eat all the natural fat that comes with fish and meat or dairy food.
Don't eat sweet fruit like apples, pears, peaches or oranges, at least in the beginning. You can have a few berries with cream.
For a start that's all you need to know.
Your First Efforts May Fail - Don't worry.
We all carry a lifetime of misinformation that stops us succeeding.
The common problems are:
Hidden sugars. Learn to read the labels.
Not eating enough good fat. Saturated fats are GOOD.
Continuing to use seed oils and vegetable oils.
Not eating enough protein. Feed Yourself.
Too many root vegetables, or too much fruit.
It takes time to learn how to do Banting without thinking all the time.
That makes it hard for yourself. Give yourself time.
The 10 Golden Rules of Banting.
edited from 
The Real Meal Revolution
1) Maintaining a level of carbohydrates that keeps you below the 50g/day threshold.
2) Don't fear the fat, you need fat to fuel your body, in the absence of carbohydrates.
3) After a few weeks on your Banting lifestyle, you should never be hungry. If you are craving carbohydrates you are probably cheating, and you are not in nutritional ketosis.
4) Buy and eat quality food. Make your butcher your friend. Buy full-fat meat products, buy offal meats, buy quality cheese, and eat lots of green and colored vegetables. It will cost more, but the value is in your improved health.
5) Look for hidden sugar, or high fructose corn syrup, in processed foods. Avoid low-fat products, because they most likely have added sugar or sugar substitutes. Avoid drinking too much milk (but cream is OK).
6) Eating vegetables ensures that you get all the vitamins and minerals that your body needs. Fruit does provide essential nutrients, but it also comes with a higher sugar content than vegetables. Berries have very little fructose, and are preferred.
7) You shouldn't need to have snacks. If you do, try a Saturated Coffee on its own.
8) The Banting Diet is not a high-protein diet. Too much protein in the diet can actually hinder the ketogenic process.
9) Don't just go on what the scales say. Use the tape measurement or use clothes as a guide to mark your progress. Use your ability to move more easily, or to get up and down, or to stand on one foot as a measure of your progress. How is your walking speed? Can you run?
10) Make bone broth for your diet, and make your own vegetable or fish soup, using stock made from animal bones or fish heads.
Some General History of the Banting Diet
The Banting Diet was a well tested old idea, especially in Germany and Austria 140 years ago, and in the USA, in text books in the early 1900's. In 1905, Dr. Nathaniel Yorke-Davis recommended the diet to President William Taft, who subsequently lost 70 pounds. The diet was popular until the 1930's when insulin was discovered.
In 1992, Dr William Castelli, who had been a director of the famous Framingham Heart Study, admitted the failure of the low-fat and low cholesterol diet. But everyone "knew" that the Woman's Health Initiative would prove him wrong. From about 1996 the very strongly supported Women's Health Initiative, began to produce black swans, then people knew for certain that the recommended diet didn't have the desired effects. But Why?
Several Doctors rediscovered the old diet and found that it worked. Why it worked wasn't supported by any clear science but there was strong evidence that people lost weight and many other health issues improved. People of note are Dr Raymond Greene (1951), Dr Alfred Bennington (1953), and Dr Robert Atkins (1972). A real rebel on this group is Dr Blake F Donaldson, who in 1962, recommended that you should just eat meat.
In the 1970's Dr Robert Atkins did battle with the scientific establishment and lost. Everybody "knew" that high fat diets killed people. Everybody "knew" what a healthy diet was. Except that over and over, everybody seems to be wrong.
Prof. Stephen Phinney and later on Dr. Jeff Volek both had problems finding anyone to fund their research into low carbohydrate, high fat diets. Dr Eric Westman, in 1999 wrote to Dr Robert Atkins, and was invited to examine his patient records. Dr Atkins was setting up the Atkins Foundation. His records were excellent and Dr Atkins was very helpful.
In the last fifteen years, much new scientific work has shown the value of LCHF diets, technically known as ketogenic diets. "New Atkins for a New You: The Ultimate Diet for Shedding Weight and Feeling Great" (2010) was written by Eric C. Westman, Stephen D. Phinney, and Jeff S. Volek. Since then Many researchers have been involved, Prof. Timothy Noakes, Dr David Unwin, Dr Richard Bernstein, Dr Andreas Eenfeldt, and Prof. Robert Lustig are among the 55 notable people working in this field who have "expert pages" in this website.
William Banting
William Banting is notable because he was the first to publish in English the European idea that a diet low in carbohydrates was important if you wanted to lose weight.
Dr Wilhelm Ebstein
The real hero of LCHF diet in Europe was Dr Wilhelm Ebstein.
From Wikipedia:
He studied medicine at the University of Breslau, and at the University of Berlin. Appointed professor at the University of Göttingen, in 1874.
He specialised in obesity and gout, as well as dyspepsia.
The introduced an number of new procedures for the treatment of nutritional problems. This included the virtual elimination of carbohydrates from the diet, while allowing fat to be administered with adequate protein.
Ebstein was critical of the Banting diet, because it was high in protein and contained much to little fat.
For gout, he recommended a high-fat diet and eating berry fruits, and no alcohol.
Ebstein believed that fat contained a nutritive value equivalent to two and a half times that of carbohydrates.
Banting v Paleo
Banting and the best Paleo diets are very similar but have different scientific roots and a different purpose. The Banting diet aims at weight loss, and maintaining you in ketosis for maximum metabolic advantage. The Paleo diet aims at reducing the permeability of the gut and restoring your body to better metabolic health, but is not concerned with ketosis. On a Paleo diet you might well be in ketosis, but that's not the objective.
