History Part 2

This is where the research of one of my favorite nutritionists, Gary Taubes, comes into play. Gary Taubes wrote the book Good Calories, Bad Calories, which in my opinion is one of the best popular works that focuses on presenting the evidence for and against the recommended American diet. Its a compelling book that gave me the idea for this blog because a good section of the book is devoted to the development of nutrition from the mid 1800s onwards.

Because of the limited availability of processed carbohydrate snack foods there was not a health crisis in the 1800s like there is today, however there were still corpulent individuals. William Banting was one of them. Banting tried everything to lose weight including adequate exercise and cutting back on calories. Unfortunately this didn't help. He became stronger which increased his appetite and his reduced caloric intake left him exhausted. He even went as far as taking purgatives and diuretics but he kept gaining weight. William Harvey, an aural surgeon, recomended that "a purely animal diet, although widely diverse in its development; and that if a purely animal diet . . . with such vegetable diet as contained neither sugar nor starch, might serve to arrest the undue formation of fat." For Banting, this diet actually worked. He lost 50 pounds by 1664 and was quoted saying "I have not felt better in health than now for the last 26 years." If this diet sounds familiar, then you have most likely heard of the Atkins diet, Mediterranean diet, or any of the other diet promoting a small carbohydrate intake and large protein and fat intake.

Over time, Banting's diet gained popularity. Many medical textbooks recommended "Banting" for the treatment of obesity. Dr. Spock, the famous parental guide, promoted a diet without rich desserts and plain, starchy foods. "For over a century, this was common wisdom" wrote Gary Taubes. However, in 1973 the American Medical Association declared Banting style diets merely dangerous fads. A healthy diet had become a low fat diet because of the recently popularized diet-heart hypothesis. People began eating less meat, lard, whole milk, and butter but increased their consumption of margarine, vegetable shortening, and salad and cooking oils. This directly coincides with the heart-disease epidemic which was falsely blamed on saturated fats. The diet-heart hypothesis influenced people to blame it on cholesterol, the evil culprit of heart disease. Between 1960 and 1980, between 12 and 14 percent of the population were considered obese. After 1980 the rate of obesity increased to over 30 percent and in 2004 1 in 3 people were considered obese.

Now Americans have a major problem. Is it possible that the change in conventional wisdom regarding a healthy diet could be at the base of the problem? I will discuss this possibility in the next blog entry and introduce my theory to the table. For now I will leave it at this:

"In medicine, we are often confronted with poorly observed and indefinite facts which form actual obstacles to science, in that men always bring them up, saying: it is a fact, it must be accepted."

- Claude Bernard