The diet of the moment, low in carbohydrates and high in protein, has attained the distinction of having survived into a third century. Its current proponents, including Dr. Robert Atkins, Dr. Barry Sears and Drs. Michael and Mary Eades, should say a little prayer of thanks every night to the man who helped make them rich. For this diet, like so many too-good-to-be-true prescriptions, has gone in and out of fashion–in this case for more than 100 years–in the great American search for the Holy Grail of easy weight loss.
In 1863, William Banting, coffinmaker to the Duke of Wellington, first popularized this regimen, which we mistakenly believe is thoroughly modern. At 5-foot-5 and more than 200 pounds, Banting was so bulky he had to walk down stairs backward. A British ear surgeon, William Harvey, prescribed for Banting a diet free of fats, starches and sugars, becoming the first in a long line of medical doctors and doctors of philosophy claiming expertise in a subject with which they had little experience.
The diet, which provided about 1,100 calories a day, worked, at least for a while, and Banting became the publisher of the first popular diet book, “A Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public.”
After he died, in 1878, “Banting” became the preferred dieting method on both sides of the Atlantic. Ever since, there has been an almost unbroken succession of diet doctors offering variations on the theme: the Grapefruit Diet, also known as the Mayo Diet (though the Mayo Clinic disavows any connection to it); Herman Taller’s “Calories Don’t Count”; Irwin Stillman’s “Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet”; Herman Tarnower’s “Scarsdale Diet.” The diet went out of fashion in the early 1980s, replaced by the high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet. Now it is back with a vengeance.
Of course most people would prefer to lose weight while eating steak and eggs instead of the celery and carrot sticks of other diets, but they lose weight doing so for the same reason people lose weight on any diet: They expend more energy (calories) than they consume. Eventually the low-carb diet will once again be replaced by another gimmick, but it will never be far away.
“These things never die out,” said Dr. William Jarvis, a professor of public health and preventive medicine at Loma Linda University in California and a co-founder of the National Council for Reliable Health Information. “They become part of the culture.”
Take Fletcherizing, which is also still with us but not under that name. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Horace Fletcher, a wealthy American businessman, spent some of his fortune persuading people to follow his lead and chew their food until it liquefied, on the theory that doing so would cause them to lose weight and remove poisons from their bodies. It is unclear whether it worked permanently for Fletcher. Contemporary accounts say he lost weight but eventually gained it back. Meanwhile, people all over the world were masticating until their jaws hurt.
In his 1998 book “Revolution at the Table: the Transformation of the American Diet,” Harvey Levenstein notes that such famous reformers and writers as Upton Sinclair, Henry James and William James were adherents of Fletcherizing. Not so long ago I heard a nutritionist suggest the same weight loss technique.
Then there is food combining. William Howard Hays introduced the concept in the 1930s, and it is alive and well today in Judy Mazel’s “New Beverly Hills Diet,” which prescribes eating certain foods at certain times and never combining carbohydrates and protein.
Even diet drugs guaranteed to maim and kill have reappeared decades after they were banned. During World War I the Russians gave their soldiers 2,4-dinitrophenol, a chemical found in explosives, to keep them warm in winter. Dinitrophenol was an effective weight-loss tool because it accelerated the metabolism, making the body burn more fat.
In the late 1920s, scientists looked at therapeutic uses of the chemical but decided it was too dangerous. That didn’t stop diet doctors from prescribing it until 1938, when it was banned because the bodies began to pile up.
Yet Dr. Nicholas Bachynsky was using it in his weight loss clinics in Texas and elsewhere in the 1980s. (In 1986 he was fined for violating regulations of the Food and Drug Administration.)
Last week among the links to Web sites warning of the hazards was one that read: “Dinitrophenol for fat loss. This stuff is amazing.” There was nothing on the Web site that the link led to, but obviously there are still people who think it is a great weight loss aid, just as people still think amphetamines are safe for losing weight.
In the 1950s, the public was taken with the vinegar diet, based on “Folk Medicine,” by Dr. D.C. Jarvis. He contended that cider vinegar combined with honey, kelp, lecithin and vitamin B6 not only cured arthritis but also produced weight loss. The rationale was that oil and vinegar don’t mix. Out of that grew the concept that vinegar is a fat cutter. It was only one more step to the theory that vinegar cuts the fat off the body.
Thus was born “The Cider Vinegar, Lecithin, Kelp, B6 Diet,” heavily advertised in women’s magazines, accompanied by articles describing the diet as miraculous. An article in the January 1974 issue of Family Circle cleared the shelves of these ingredients.
People who rushed out to buy them may have skipped over the part that said the mysterious mixture always worked “as long as a low-calorie regime was strictly adhered to.”
A recent look on the Internet turned up 11 sites advocating the diet.
By the late 1970s, people were moving on to starch blockers, which are a concentrate of raw legumes like red kidney beans and are supposed to prevent starches from splitting into sugar. If this were true, it would mean that you could eat potatoes and rice and bread without absorbing them; they would pass through the intestinal tract undigested, taking all their calories with them.
By 1982 starch blockers had made the pages of People magazine as the latest in a long line of quick-weight-loss gimmicks, even though reputable scientists had declared them useless. The FDA seized more than a million starch blockers in 1982. But the agency’s regulatory authority was severely curtailed by the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in 1994, and now starch blockers are back.
“What’s interesting about starch blockers is how much science there is that they don’t work,” said Dr. Marion Nestle, chairwoman of the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University.
Yet check one of many sites on the Web selling starch blockers like Phase’oLean Forte, L.M. Enterprises and Life Plus, where exactly the same promises that caused their seizure 17 years ago are still being made.
Magic cures will always be with us, and there is no reason to believe we’ll be acting any smarter when 2099 rolls around.
