"First espoused by Dr. Robert Atkins in the early 1970s..."Well, not exactly, Atkins cites research on diabetes going back, I think, to maybe the thirties or fourties, and I remember listening to Dr. Carlton Frederics on the radio, who warned of the dangers of Carbs/hypoglycemia to general health and well-being. He passed away in the early eighties and Atkins moved to the forefront..
Actually I don't remember this from any personal knowledge.. LOL, but I found out this diet and theory all started with a small booklet entitled Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public, not written by a dietitian 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. 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 labors 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 pitas", 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, vapor 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 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 inquiring 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 recognized 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.