Sugar, Diet and the Food Industry
If you have ever asked yourself, when did diets begin? You can find the original Banting diet online. It is named after Willam Banting who was very successful in losing a lot of weight and keeping it off. He went to see a doctor, who today would be an Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist. Banting went to see him because he was losing his hearing. But in the language of the 1840s, he was a very corpulent man. In other words, he was obese. To be clear, obesity was not as common even fifty years ago as it is today. In fact, it was rare and tended to afflict those of better means. Though some poor people may have had it as well. From what Banting ate we can assume he was of some means because it included true luxuries, such as white bread and sugar.
These days sugar is everywhere. You can find it in cookies, cakes, yogurts, salad dressings. It is also in bread and cereal. It is there to keep food shelf-stable. So obesity is not rare. In fact, non-communicable diseases, and metabolic syndrome are on the rise globally.
Banting wrote in his Letter on Corpulence:
I have now retired, so that my corpulence and subsequent obesity was not through neglect of necessary bodily activity, nor from excessive eating, drinking, or self-indulgence of any kind, except that I partook of the simple aliments of bread, milk, butter, beer, sugar, and potatoes more freely than my aged nature required, and hence, as I believe, the generation of the parasite, detrimental to comfort if not really to health (sic)
We now know that bread, sugar, potatoes are indeed fattening, and so is beer. Butter has no effect on the system, but they had no idea back then how it worked on the body. Moreover, we need fats for our tissues. The diet has since been revised to match modern knowledge. But at its core, it is the first Keto diet that we know off. Why it came about is what is fascinating. The doctor, William Harve, F.R.C.S. Surgeon to the Royal Dispensary for Diseases wrote this in the same document:
…it occurred to me that excessive obesity might be allied to diabetes as to its cause, although widely diverse in its development: and that if a purely animal diet was useful in the latter disease, a combination of animal food with such vegetable matter as contained neither sugar nor starch, might serve to arrest…