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WILLIAM BANTING:
The Father of the Low-Carbohydrate Diet
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 (1796-1878)
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 66, 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, Helen Densmore,
modelled diets on Banting. She tells how she and her
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'. Her 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 her
profession who derided Banting's diet. She 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 10
September 2002
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