No Slim Tale: The Rich History of Losing Weight with High-Fat Diets
No Slim Tale: The Rich History of Losing Weight with High-Fat Diets
Discover the 160-year journey of low-carb diets, from William Banting to today's ongoing debate on weight loss and health.
In the Western world, using carbohydrate-restricted diets to shed unwanted pounds traces its origins back to a thin 19th-century pamphlet published in London by a retired undertaker named William Banting. His Letter On Corpulence, Addressed To The Public in 1864, is an unquestioned milestone in keto history.
At the age of 66, Banting, a man of five feet and five inches, weighed more than 200 lbs and was riddled with health troubles from diminished hearing and failing eyesight to weak joints. Doing his best to follow his doctor’s advice to eat less and exercise more only brought him constant hunger and exhaustion.
When Banting’s hearing continued to decline, approaching deafness, he sought the help of an ear surgeon named William Harvey. Harvey knew that a common approach among farmers to fatten their livestock was to gorge them on diets high in sugar and starch. Suspecting that a link to obesity lay in excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates, Harvey recommended a low-carbohydrate diet to Banting, primarily composed of meat, game, and seafood. Within a year, Banting reported losing his 50 lbs and all his debilitating physical ailments. His anecdotal experience, published in the Letter On Corpulence, sold 63,000 copies in Britain and was reportedly read widely in Germany, France, and America.
Canadian physician Sir William Osler, generally credited as “the father of modern medicine” and one of the founders of Johns Hopkins University, enshrined a version of Banting’s low-carb diet for weight loss in his epoch-defining 1892 medical textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine. Beginning in 1905, an English doctor named Nathaniel Yorke-Davis would also use the restriction of carbohydrates to help American president William Howard Taft shed 70 lbs.
Toward the end of the First World War, a Long Island doctor named Blake Donaldson rediscovered carbohydrate restriction somewhat independently of his predecessors. Frustrated by his failure at helping patients lose weight with the “eat less, move more” method, he was hungry for a better approach. Donaldson found his ears perking up during a tour of the American Museum of Natural History, where he was informed that the indigenous Inuit population, apparently a model of active lifestyles and exemplary health, seemed to live on nothing but fatty cuts of meat. In the decades that followed, Donaldson treated thousands and thousands of patients. Not only did he report them to lose roughly 3 lbs a week without feeling deprived, but they could keep their weight controlled long term.
In 1944, Donaldson gave a lecture about his work at a hospital in New York that would greatly influence an incredibly influential person. That man in the audience was Alfred Pennington, the in-house physician for the DuPont chemical corporation. DuPont, like many American corporations of the era, had a boardroom full of middle-aged, overweight executives who were dying of heart diseases at an alarming rate. Pennington selected 20 of these gentlemen to participate in a monitored diet that was restricted in carbohydrates but not calories.
As he predicted, the 20 men lost up to 10 pounds a month, with reported energy and overall well-being benefits, despite eating as much as they liked. Pennington may have been unique in remaining unsatisfied with this result- he wanted to know why these patients were losing weight even though their caloric intake was abundant. Writing extensively on the subject, especially in a widely-read review in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1952, Pennington’s research drew from a wealth of Austrian and German science buried in the wake of World War 2.
While the war had truncated the progression of European science and effectively made English the language of science globally, Pennington discovered that the hypothesis he was looking for already existed: the German and Austrian researchers had developed a hormonal theory of fat storage. The theory held, broadly speaking, that not all types of calories have the same effect on human hormones, which must bear a critical role in metabolism, specifically whether fat is stored and locked away or mobilized and burned for fuel.
In 1972, a cardiologist named Dr Atkins presented the low-carbohydrate, high-fat (LCHF) way of eating to the American public all over again in his Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution, a book for the mainstream that sensationalized the issue (even by its very title). Atkins himself treated thousands of his patients with the diet, but this made little impact on the opinions of his detractors.
By this point, the lines were drawn: for the proponents of LCHF benefits, from weight loss to beyond, the proof was in the pudding, and the results were plain to see, indeed undeniable. For the skeptics, the recommendation to reduce carbohydrates and embrace fats was “the equivalent of mass murder,” as described memorably in 1965 by Harvard’s Jean Mayer, one of America’s foremost nutrition professionals.
Nevertheless, neither the high-fat approach nor its opponents have managed to put the issue to rest, and even in 2024, a full 160 years after William Banting’s monumental pamphlet, the debate rages on.
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Taubes, G. (2021). The case for keto: Rethinking weight control and the science and practice of low-carb/high-fat eating. ANCHOR BOOKS.
Teicholz, N. (2015). The big fat surprise: Why butter, meat and cheese belong in a healthy diet. Simon & Schuster.
