The History Of Diets And Dieting

Vital Information

By Dr. Beth Gruber, CarbSmart Contributor

Posted 5/25/2002

With this article, I'm starting a series of columns that look at the history of diets and dieting - the plans and the personalities behind the plans. We are all so used to the idea of diets, that it is hard to believe there was ever a time when the "D word" wasn't on everyone's lips from morning to night.

The word 'diet' actually means "those things that are customarily eaten," but when we speak of diets nowadays, we are usually referring to a food regime designed to change something. There are diets for those who wish to avoid certain chemicals in foods, such as salt-free diet or a lactose-free diets. There are diets to increase the consumption of certain nutrients, such as a high-potassium diet. There are even diets designed to encourage weight gain - an amazing thought, in itself.

But for the most part, when the word 'diet' is used, it is in relation to losing weight. And weight loss diets are Big Box Office! Nearly ten years ago, in 1993, Americans were spending some 30 billion dollars on books, video tapes, nutritional aides, reducing salons, and other diet-related goods and services. Today, we spend much, much more.

We'll be talking about the various diet plans and about some of the weight loss devices as we go along. But where did it all begin? Of that, we can't be certain, but we can start with some stories of attempts at dieting from years gone by.

A Liquid Diet?

It is said that in the year 1087, William the Conqueror (who became King of England after his success at the Battle of Hastings) found he could no longer ride his horse because he was too fat. He reportedly refused to get out of bed, and began drinking alcohol instead of eating food in an attempt to lose weight. If this story is true, it may be the first recorded instance of someone changing food intake in order to reduce their bulk.

Although it is apparently true that he had grown quite fat by the end of his life, we have no record of what success King William's alcoholic 'liquid diet' might have had. King William died that same year, but since he died from injuries he suffered when his horse fell, we may assume his regime was at least partially successful, because he was on his horse once again.

In the close to 915 years since King William's death, there have been many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of diet plans and diet theories. But it wasn't until nearly-current times that anyone has had any realunderstanding the relationships between eating and gaining or losing weight. Everyone knew that food played some part in the process because if people had no access to food at all, they wasted away. But even though that part would seem obvious enough, many who had no food, had no water either, and they would die from lack of water long before they would die from lack of food. This confused the observations. Another fact that muddied the waters was that some people managed to live on the same amount of food that others were unable to survive on.

Nutrition Is A Modern Concept

Until modern times, it was not known that certain foods were required for life. It was generally thought that all foods were the same, and so long as people ate something, they would be all right. People ate what they could get, what they could afford, what they liked, or what they could grow, raise, or catch. And, for the most part, unless they were amongst the well-to-do classes, they ate pretty much the same thing all the time. (As late as 1965, I personally knew a man who ate virtually the exact same thing every single day - from choice, not necessity. He was of the quite-firm opinion that the human body would take whatever food it received and convert it into whatever was needed.)

Prior to the 18th century, foods were not refined in any way. Since most naturally-occurring foods have at least a little protein and little fat, even when people ate a very limited diet, they managed to scrape by. Prisoners fed 'only bread and water' were occasionally given something else, and the bread provided just barely enough whole-grain protein to sustain life, at least for some of the poor fellows. There was precious little or no food science at all.

The First Nutritional Link

Once people were able to build boats that would withstand voyages on the ocean, sailors started getting (and dying from) a mysterious disease called scurvy, which had not been known before. But, it was not at all clear to anyone that it was a lack of something in the food the sailors ate (a lack of Vitamin C) that caused the problem. But, even when people of the time could see that certain seafaring groups didn't seem to be getting the disease (primarily groups who ate sauerkraut), they didn't make the connection for a very long time.

To be fair, the connection was not all that easy to make. After all, even though many of the sailors came down with scurvy, not all did, and not all contracted scurvy at the same time. Furthermore, not all the sailors who did get the disease died from it.

Knowledge, Little By Little

Knowledge is slowly acquired, and with it come strange, often 'crack-pot' ideas. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to tell one from the other. (Consider that there are many who truly consider the low carbohydrate approach to be, at best, less than thrilling.) Some of the diet ideas we will be talking about over the next few articles will seem very odd, perhaps resembling nothing more than 'snake oil.' But it is instructive to look at them, and we will assume that the originator of each plan had the best motives, if we can. The best way to judge where we are now, is to look at where we've been.

Posted 6/8/2002

Last time, we started talking about the history of diets and dieting. I pointed out that although the word diet actually refers to those things that are customarily eaten, these days we usually mean an attempt to lose weight.

Since the idea of dieting began, there have been many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of diet plans and diet theories. But the need to lose weight wasn't a general problem in olden times. Food was scarce, and people had to work constantly to get enough of it. For the most part, in those days only the wealthy or powerful could become fat.

Gradually, food became more widely and generally available, and as soon as that happened, people started concerning themselves with what was eaten and for what reasons. Thus arose food-related behavior, such as ceremonial foods, foods allowed only to royalty, foods considered to be fit only for peasants, foods fed to religious leaders or sacrificed to the gods, and other ritual connections to foods. Eventually, when there was enough food available to the average person such that one could eat to excess, eating too much began to be seen as gluttony, and gluttony, as a sin.

Getting Fat

Now, let's stand back and look at this. For thousands of years, mankind struggled to get enough to eat, and just as soon as there was food enough to go around, some people started to get fat. We have to remember that our bodies are essentially the same as those of our ancient ancestors. Then, as now, food eaten in excess of that needed for immediate energy, growth, or tissue repair was stored for use later. Those of our ancestors whose bodies were most efficient at storing the excess tended to live the longest and reproduce most successfully. When there was a lot of food most of the time, the bodies of our more recent ancestors were 'delighted' to be able to store up even more. After all, hard times might come again, any day.

Consequently, we can see that the ability to store food as fat has been available to us all along, but the opportunity to store increasing amounts has only been a common fact of life for the past couple ofhundred years. Most early ideas about diet and dieting, therefore, originated in the 1800s.

Food Choices And Gluttony

The first person to publicly combine ideas of religious fervor, food choices, and health appears to be an American minister by the name of Sylvester Graham. In the early 1830s, Graham began to preach that all manner of immorality was related to the sin of gluttony, and that the answer to good health, both morally and spiritually, was to follow a bland, vegetarian diet. In Graham's view, gluttony led to indigestion, which then led to a state of what he called 'overstimulation'. This, he said, eventually led to illness.

Graham preached temperance, and a life without coffee, tea, or other stimulants. He stressed a diet high in coarse-ground whole-wheat flour which he baked into flat bread, referred to as Graham Crackers. Graham objected to the bread produced by city bakers because they used refined flour.

Graham's followers were known as Grahamites, while he, himself, came to be known as 'Dr. Sawdust'. Although his devotees claimed they gained strength and health from following Graham's plan, they were described by others at the time as looking pale and sickly.

Obesity In The General Population

The relationship of foods to health was not well understood in the 19th century or before. (Some would question whether or not it is well understood even today.) People did not much believe that it mattered what you ate. Diets typically included a lot of bread, potatoes, pastry, and root vegetables such as turnips. People were starting to eat more and more sugar in puddings and cakes, and they ate only as much milk and meat as they could afford. Meat was typically spread thin in stews, flour-thickened soups, or meat pies. Beer, wine, and other distilled beverages were considered part of the daily fare. Obesity, which had been largely unknown, began to be a more common complaint in the late 1700s and the early 1800s.

Gathering The Important Information

Before the late 1800s, no one understood why some people got fat and others didn't, except that it might relate to sin or serious disease. No one knew what to do about it, or what might help. Consider that the first artificial sweetener, Saccharin, wasn't invented until 1879.

In the 1890s, chemist Wilbur Atwater began to study how foods were made up of nutritional components, specifically proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. He developed the idea of measuring the heat value of each of the groups by burning the nutritional components and measuring the amount of heat they gave off. Each amount of heat that raised the temperature of one gram of water by one degree centigrade he called a calorie. But no one was sure what to do with the idea.

The Beginning Of Diet Aids

By the early 1890s, doctors who had previously thought obesity was incurable began to think of it as a disease caused by lack of thyroid hormone. Animal-based thyroid compounds started to be prescribed for weight loss in 1894. And, since something could be given to treat obesity, people thought other things might also work. In 1896 the first advertisements for products said to promote weight loss appeared. Common ingredients in these products were laxatives, purgatives, arsenic, strychnine, washing soda, and Epsom salts.

Posted 6/29/2002

The World's First Diet Plan

We've been talking about diets and dieting. Dieting for weight loss has really only been a potential issue for the average person in the last few hundred years because prior to that, most people's problem was getting enough food, not getting too much. But by the mid 1800s obesity wasbecoming a problem for some people.

In England around 1850, a man named William Banting was trying to reduce his size. He found he had to descend stairs backwards because of pain in his ankles and knees if he went down in the usual fashion, and he had to have help in tying his shoes. Banting tried starvation, purgatives, diuretics, hot Turkish baths, and rigorous exercise. These were all unsuccessful. Some of the doctors that he consulted told him that obesity was simply incurable.

Low Carbohydrate Advice Is Not New!

William Banting is of major interest to us because he is the first person on record to follow a low carbohydrate diet, and to write about his experiences with the plan. After much failure in trying to lose weight, Banting had occasion to consult a Dr. William Harvey for a totally unrelated medical condition, and found the answer to his overweight problem in the bargain. Dr. Harvey recommended that Banting change his diet by cutting out most sugar and starch since foods containing those substances tend to create body fat.

The dietary plan that Banting followed dictated four meals a day chosen from protein (meat, poultry, or fish), green vegetables, a little unsweetened fruit, several glasses of dry wine, and a little dry toast. (Toast was allowed in Banting's plan because it was generally believed at that time that toasting bread diminished the starch in it. Another common misconception of the time was that pork contained starch. Therefore, Banting's diet plan did not include any pork.)

Banting wrote that he ate no root vegetables, no potatoes or bread, no sugar, no sweetened drinks, and no pastries or desserts. As a result of following his low carbohydrate plan, Banting dropped fifty pounds at the rate of about one pound per week. He was overjoyed! Because he wanted to share his discovery with others, he wrote what turned out to be theworld's first diet book.

The First Diet Book

Isn't it amazing that the world's first diet book suggested a low carbohydrate plan? Actually more of a booklet or pamphlet than a true book, it was called Letter On Corpulence Addressed to the Public. Banting published the first edition in 1862. (Take note: 1862, not 1962!) The booklet later went into four editions, and achieved worldwide circulation after being translated into French and German. Some 68,000 copies of the booklet were sold over a five to six year period, and this at a time when at least half of the population could not read, and when diet advice was generally unknown.

It Has Been Known For A Century And A Half!

I personally think this is just too incredible! The truth about the low carbohydrate diet has been known for at least 140 years! Furthermore, some professional men that Banting met after publication of his book 140 years ago told him his dietary system was "as old as the hills," which means the truth was known for much longer than 140 years! One of Banting's correspondents told him that his diet plan had "long beenrecommended" to men who were training for running or boxing, but had never been applied to unhealthy or overweight people because the diet plan was tied up with those sporting activities. Banting declared that "by proper diet alone, the evils of corpulence may be removed without the addition of those active exercises, which are impossible to the sickly or unwieldy patient."

Even The Very First Low Carber Was Given Grief!

When Banting published the fourth edition of his book, about 1865, he described how he had "finally become invulnerable to the ridicule, contempt, or abuse which were not spared in the earlier stages." And he told how he had come to "look with pity, not unmixed with sorrow, upon men of eminence [the British Medical Association] who had the rashness and folly to designate the dietary system as 'humbug'..."

Remember, we are talking about 1865, here! The medical profession had no idea how to treat obesity, but they were sure Banting's way was wrong! Banting said that doctors of his day objected that he "could not have consulted any eminent members of their fraternity on the subject of obesity." This, despite the fact that he repeatedly pointed out that his "medical advisers were neither few, nor of second-rate reputation," but that not one of them had suggested the real cause of the obesity from which he suffered, nor proposed any remedy, until he consulted Dr. Harvey. Many of us find that our own family, friends, or doctors object to the low carbohydrate life choices we are making. We are in good company, and have been so for all these years.

They Called The Diet Plan "Banting"

When Banting published the third and fourth edition of his 'Letter,' he was very concerned to show the advantages of the system that had come to be called "Banting." He also wanted to assure the reading public that he had not found any dangers to others who had followed his plan. Some 2,000 people wrote to him, attesting to their successes!

But apparently word of problems arising from the diet were as common then as now, and Banting pointed out that these reports proved to have "no better foundation than the frequent reports of my death, or of my being seriously ill and afflicted with boils, carbuncles, and other ailments through my rigid pursuit of the dietary system." Today we are told that our cholesterol levels will suffer, or that our kidneys will give up the ghost, accusations that are equally without foundation.

Posted 7/13/2002

Into The 20th Century

Our low carbohydrate way of life is not new, dear readers. Last time I told you that the world's very first diet book was a low carbohydrate plan written in the mid 1800s by William Banting. Banting was told about this approach to obesity control by his ear doctor, Dr. William Harvey. Dr. Harvey said that he had heard about healthful advantages from a diet low in sugar and starch while he was in Germany and Paris. He related that he had traveled to attend a lecture given at Stuttgart by a celebrated physician and professor, Dr. Niemeyer. Dr. Harvey had also gone to Paris to hear a certain Doctor Bernard report on using the diet plan for treatment of diabetes.

Now, if you are prone to get angry at the 'primrose path' we have been led down for years, this is the time to do it. Consider: In the mid-1800s, no one had the slightest idea what caused diabetes or what to do about it. People with what we now call Type I diabetes merely died, usually in early childhood. And those with adult-onset diabetes (so-called Type II) had their lives materially shortened. Before 1860, doctors in Paris had been finding successes with the low carbohydrate approach, yet all these years later, our self-styled modern experts on diabetes are still blind to the plan!

As Beans To A Horse

William Banting came to think of the foods he should not eat "as beans to a horse." A horse, he said, ordinarily eats hay and oats. Beans may be a useful food occasionally, but they are detrimental to the horse if eaten all the time. He began to refer to all starchy and sugary foods as"human beans." He wrote, "Experience has taught me that these human beans are enemies of man."

After losing weight by controlling them, Banting became certain that starches and sugars were responsible for fattening fat people. And even though he was not a scientist, he did some testing. Banting wrote, "I have ascertained, by repeated experiments, that five ounces of sugar distributed equally over seven days, which is not an ounce per day, will augment my weight nearly one pound by the end of that short period."

Banting also talked about what we sometimes call "planned cheats," that is, deciding to go off the plan on a special day or for a certain reason. He said, "Being fond of green peas, I take them daily in the season, and I gain 2 or 3 pounds in weight as well as some little in bulk, but I soon lose both when their season is over."

So there we have it, friends. Almost 150 years ago.

Products Come Into Favor

William Banting died in 1878. After that, the low carbohydrate approach, which was not popular with the established medical community, was pushed aside in favor of products. After all, Banting's low carbohydrate plan did not involve profits for anyone.

In 1879, the artificial sweetener Saccharin was invented. It became the basis for the Monsanto company. In 1894, animal-based thyroid compounds were developed, and drug companies were born. Doctors began to prescribe thyroid pills for weight loss in patients who were said to be overweight because of hormone problems.

Then in 1896 the first advertisements for products marketed exclusively for weight loss started to appear. Ingredients in these products included laxatives, purgatives, arsenic, strychnine, washing soda, and Epsom salts. There was no turning back.

Countless Plans, Countless Promoters

There have been countless diet plans. Most diet promoters have been doctors, but there have been dozens of different kinds of nutritionists, industrial tycoons, housewives, writers, preachers, actors, and some people with no obvious bona fides at all.

In the early years of the 1900s, American writer Upton Sinclair advocated fasting as a cure for both obesity and emaciation. A couple of years later, a spiritualist and magician named Hereward Carrington advocated eating only raw fruits and vegetables in his 1912 book, The Natural Food of Man. Carrington also wrote a few other books, including The Side Show and Animal Tricks and An Introduction to the Maniac.

A White Jacket Must Mean He Knows What He's Talking About

Then we come to Horace Fletcher. Horace Fletcher was absolutely dedicated to the process of chewing. Known both as the Great Masticator and as the Chew-Chew Man, Fletcher was the first to wear a white jacket to give himself a look of authority. He apparently gleaned his diet ideas from a former British prime minister named William Gladstone who believed that prolonged chewing resulted in less overeating and led to improved health. Fletcher saw this as the answer to everything.

Gladstone had suggested that thirty-two chews per food morsel was the ideal amount of chewing. He based this on the number of teeth in the mouth. But, Fletcher went beyond that, urging that food should be chewed until it turned to liquid. And this held true even for food that was already liquid! Liquids, Fletcher insisted, should also be chewed a few times, too.

There was at least one definite drawback to Fletcher's advice. He suggested that any food that did not become liquid in the mouth, should not be swallowed. This eliminated all the fiber from the diets of his followers, and constipation became a significant problem among his followers.

The recommended foods in Fletcher's plan were: potatoes, cornbread, beans, and sometimes eggs, but not meat, alcohol, coffee, or tea. His rules were:

Otherwise, the dieter could eat whatever foods he/she wanted on Fletcher's plan, just so long as the food was chewed until, as Fletcher put it, "the food swallowed itself."

Fletcher lost sixty-five pounds by chewing, some might say from the exercise of moving his jaw to distraction alone! He then wrote a book called The AB-Z of Our Own Nutrition. At one time, Fletcher claimed a million Americans were following his plan, including John D. Rockefeller and many students at Yale and West Point, who began calling it "Fletcherizing."

One of the most famous devotees of Fletcher's plan was Dr. John Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg Cereal company. But Kellogg balked at the no-fiber issue, and began to manufacture cereal products. (We'll talk about John Kellogg and corn flakes in another article. Stay tuned.)

Posted July 27, 2002

We've been discussing the history of diets and dieting. It may seem obvious to you that the idea of the calorie, at least as it pertains to dieting, must have been with us since the beginning of dieting. However, such is not the case. As we discussed last time, it wasn't until the 1890s and early 1900s that chemists Wilbur Atwater and Russell Chittenden did the initial work of measuring food as units of heat that could be produced by burning it. But from the get-go, the calorie concept has never been nearly as scientific as it may appear.

Calories are not something that are in food, they are merely a measurement of how much heat can be produced by burning the food in a laboratory, under controlled conditions. The calorie count is said to be the amount of energy that the food provides to our bodies, but it is really the amount of heat produced when the food is burned to dry, powdered ashes.

Counting Calories

Just two years before Horace Fletcher (the 'chew-chew man' who urged everyone to chew their food until it was liquid) died in 1919, a Los Angeles physician named Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters published her book entitled Diet and Health, with a Key to the Calories. Counting calories was a very new concept when Dr. Peters introduced the idea. Addressing herself mainly to women, she urged readers to think of the word calorie as a unit of measurement, like a gallon or a pound. She wrote "Hereafter you are going to eat 100 calories of bread, not a slice of bread." Dr. Peters recommended a 1200 calorie per day limit, with somewhat more allowed after weight goal was reached.

In her book, Dr. Peters told readers that successful dieting is a hard, demanding, lifelong commitment, requiring vigilance, exercise, and probably some suffering. Although she preached discipline and self-denial, and although people didn't want to hear that at that time anymore than they want to hear it today, she sold two million books, making hers the first bestseller American diet book.

This was the first book to advocate calorie counting as a method of weight reduction, and it had far reaching effects. Dr. Peters promoted what she called the "scientific principle" that calorie control equaled weight control, and therefore, people who were unable to control their weight simply had no discipline or self-control. Prior to the mid-1800s, obesity was generally considered to be a bad luck situation for which there was no cure, short of near starvation. Dr. Peters can be credited with starting the idea that being overweight is a sign of moral weakness. Since weight control was emerging as the new morality, being fat must be immoral.

Not So Much What You Eat, But When You Eat

After the success of Dr. Peters' book, other writers saw their way clear to spread their own ideas. In the 1920s and 1930s, the emphasis began to be put on food combinations, that is, what foods were eaten, and when, rather than how much was consumed. This approach was first put forth by William H. Hay and by Gayelord Hauser.

Hay insisted that proteins, starches, and fruits had to be eaten separately to avoid acidosis, which he claimed "drained vitality and led to fat." He urged one food category per meal, plus an enema every day to "flush out the poisons." Critics who pointed out that nature mixes proteins and carbohydrates in many foods, and that the human digestive system seems able to handle the mix, were roundly ignored by Hay and his followers, who included Henry Ford.

In Gayelord Hauser's book, Look Younger, Live Longer, he promoted his own plan. He also developed his own line of special foods and supplements, stressing vitamin B-rich wonder foods, such as brewer's yeast, wheat germ, yogurt, powdered skim milk, and blackstrap molasses. Among the followers of Hauser's plan were film stars such as Greta Garbo and Paulette Goddard, who would sometimes join Hauser in eating such things as broiled grapefruit with wild rice.

Hauser coined the words "appestat" and "hungerstat," asserting that the first was an acquired appetite for the wrong foods, and the second a natural appetite for nutritionally correct foods.

Eating Foods In "Magic Pairs"

Another version of the viewpoint that foods should be eaten in correct combinations was the so-called "magic pairs" recommendation. Foods that were considered to be "magic pairs" supposedly had increased fat-burning properties. Among the pairs were lamb chops and pineapple. These were interesting ideas, but there was really no science behind them. We still see some diet plans that claim they have discovered food combinations that melt away fat.

In addition to diet plans, during the 1920s and 1930s there were many substances offered up as the answers to losing weight. Most of these things, including bladderwrack, kelp, and pokeberry were listed by the American Medical Association in its collection of "Nostrums and Quackery." Of course, being looked down upon by the AMA is no proof whatsoever that the substances were, in fact, useless. But all these years later, there still don't appear to be any substances that are the answers to weight loss.

The Great Depression stopped a lot of diet plan promotion. People had other things to worry about. Then in the early 1940s came World War II, with food rationing and shortages. It wasn't until the late 1940s and the early 1950s that weight loss programs began to reemerge. Join me next time, when we'll take up the story again.

Posted 8/17/2002

Last time we continued our discussion of the history of diets and dieting by talking about the first low calorie diet plan, and about the beginnings of counting calories. We also looked at diets that were based on 'magic pairs' and on special food combinations said to promote weight loss because of some supposedly long-forgotten-but-now-rediscovered chemical connection between the two foods. These connections were said to somehow fool the body into absorbing less nutrients than the individual foods, eaten separately, would provide.

In addition to those ideas (which do not work, by the way), there was one notable version of the food combination diet that suggested the important factor was the category of foods eaten. Whereas former incarnations of food combination ideas stressed revealing the so-called 'secrets' of food combinations, this other plan claimed to be telling the public the actual truth about human physiology, the truth about what our bodies really want and need.

The "Truth" About Human Physiology - ?

In the 1970s Harvey and Marilyn Diamond promoted their book Fit for Life which proposed that our bodies have scientific needs for certain categories of foods at certain hours of the day. Their plan included recommendations for eating only fruit before noon, and never eating protein at the same time as carbohydrates during the remaining hours of the day. Although they claimed that science supports this viewpoint, they offered no science to show that the body could tell morning from afternoon, or that the body cannot digest both proteins and carbohydrates at the same time.

Even a cursory reading of the book showed it to have glaring faults. For one thing, many naturally occurring foods have both carbohydrates and proteins in their make-up; rice, beans, and grains are prime examples. Additionally, the book was quite dogmatic (and quite wrong) on the differences between some recommended morning fruits and some recommended protein-free afternoon vegetables. For example, the Diamonds included tomatoes as one of the food items they called vegetables. But tomatoes are actually fruit. By their own advice, the authors should have included tomatoes and tomato juice as breakfast foods, yet these things were rejected for before-noon eating, and relegated to later in the day.

But, faults not withstanding, the paperback edition of the book claimed to be "Americas All-Time #1 Health and Diet Book," and asserted that there were "over 3 million copies in print."

Treating Obesity With Less

Obesity has been of concern for a long time, but, as we have previously discussed, most doctors before (and even during) the 19th century had little idea concerning its cause. As early as 1829, the Surgeon Extraordinary to the Prince Regent, Dr. William Wadd, decided that he had the simple answer. Obesity, he said, was caused by "an overindulgence at the table." Wadd also gave as his first principle of treatment, the "taking of food that has little nutrition in it." However, just exactly what that might be was not entirely clear at the time. In 1943, some 115 years later, one Marion White came up with an idea of how to do it.

Ms. White wrote a book called Diet Without Despair in which she advised her readers to use mineral oil in their foods instead of olive oil. This was a bizarre idea since it was clear from the outset that it would have, at minimum, uncomfortable results.

Mineral oil cannot be digested by the human body, but it doesn't pass through the digestive system harmlessly. It causes intestinal gas, bloating, diarrhea, and other not-so-pleasant gastrointestinal disturbances. Because of its tendency to cause diarrhea, it has been used (unwisely) as a laxative.

If you have been a reader of these pages for some time, you will recall that when we were talking about fats and oils, I pointed out that the word oil refers to a fat that is liquid at room temperature. The word oil does not refer to something that is necessarily a food. Dieting Without Despair did not become a household bible. (to find those articles, click here: Vital Information)

Also along the line of providing food that isn't food was the birth of the fake fat industry. This began in 1955 when a man named O. A. Batista spun some rayon in a blender and found that it looked and felt like fat. He marketed this substance as Avicel, but it didn't taste anything like fat, and was a total commercial flop. Some 40 years later, in the 1990s, another fake fat was introduced. Called Olestra and sold under the trade name Olean, it was (and possibly still is) used in such things as potato chips. Olestra is a fat molecule that is too big to be digested, but clearly, no one learned from the lessons taught by mineral oil, that indigestible fats cause major intestinal discomfort. Olestra/Olean produces diarrhea and other gastrointestinal symptoms, but since the manufacturers had a great interest in selling the product, they simply reported that "most people" have had no problems with it.

Treating Obesity With Still Less, And Finally With Nothing

Another odd investigation into weight loss by the "taking of food that has little nutrition in it" was done by the US Army during World War II. In a study that was disturbingly too similar to some of the so-called experiments done by the Nazis in concentration camps in Europe, the Army investigators studied the effects of semi-starvation diets, using military conscientious objectors as subjects. Most of the participants were healthy and vigorous young men when the study began, but by the time it was over, most of them had become quite ill.

The logical extension of the trend to advise less and less food went beyond semi-starvation to a No Food At All plan. In the 1970s, this idea was promoted by Dr. Robert Linn in his The Last Chance Diet. Linn promoted a fast; the dieter ate nothing at all. But, several times a day the fast was broken by a small drink of the concoction that Linn had invented called Prolinn. Prolinn, a liquid protein that provided less than 400 calories a day, consisted of ground-up and crushed animal horns, hooves, hides, tendons, bones, and other slaughterhouse byproducts that were treated with artificial flavors, colors, and enzymes to break them down.

Warnings were issued about the dangers of staying on this program for a prolonged time, since the drink did not provide enough nutrients, and it was thought to endanger the kidneys. This is interesting since there is always talk about how high protein diets endanger the kidneys. But the Last Chance diet was not high protein; it was merely only protein. It could just as easily been called a low protein diet. It is doubtful that the drink itself was actually dangerous. What was dangerous was the prolonged fast. Nevertheless, an estimated two to four million people tried the diet. Some lost weight. Fifty-eight people were reported to have died from heart attacks while on the plan.

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