Banting: meet the man behind the diet

Published Sep 16, 2014

Share

Cape Town - From family steakhouse Spur to niche neighbourhood eatery the Dog’s Bollocks (home of Cape Town’s biggest burger), low-carbohydrate menu choices are everywhere.

Most draw inspiration from The Real Meal Revolution, the best-selling diet and cookbook written by Professor Tim Noakes and his (often forgotten) co-authors, nutritionist Sally-Ann Creed, chef Jonno Proudfoot and restaurateur David Grier.

The book has caused a fair amount controversy.

After some parliamentarians made noises about supporting the book’s low-carbohydrate, high-fat recommendations, four staff members of UCT’s Faculty of Health Sciences expressed “deep concern” about the “long-term impact this may have on the health of the very people they have been elected to serve”.

Noakes, in response, said scientific evidence supported his views.

If restaurants, especially in Cape Town, are drawing inspiration from the book (the first Banting restaurant opened in Green Point last month), The Real Meal Revolution draws its inspiration from an older source: a pamphlet written 151 years ago in Victorian London by undertaker William Banting, who described how to conquer the “lamentable disease” of corpulence.

Today the term “Banting” lives on to describe a high-protein low-carbohydrate diet.

“Of all the parasites that affect humanity, I do not know of, nor can I imagine, any more distressing than that of obesity,” wrote Banting in his pamphlet “Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public”.

Standing 5 foot 5 inches tall (160cm), the funeral director weighed more than 90kg.

 

First published in 1863, the 20-page letter (later editions were longer) is to the low-carbohydrate community what the Communist Manifesto is to Marxists.

Like a modern day self-help book, Banting wrote about the many diets he tried, and how none succeeded.

“Few men have led a more active life, bodily or mentally,” he wrote. “My corpulence and subsequent obesity was not through neglect of necessary bodily activity, nor from excessive eating, drinking, or self-indulgence.”

For 30 years the undertaker laboured in vain to shed pounds.

After an “eminent surgeon” recommended “increased bodily exertion”, Banting took to rowing in the early morning.

Although he “gained muscular vigour”, the rowing awakened such an appetite in him that he put on weight and was counselled to stop.

“The tendency to corpulence remained,” he wrote.

He went swimming, walking and horseback riding.

“(I have tried) the waters and climate of Leamington many times, as well as those of Cheltenham and Harrogate frequently,” he wrote of the then-popular cure resorts.

Banting wrote he wanted to slim down because of the stigma of being overweight.

Victorian London, it seemed, already had body shaming.

“I am confident no man labouring under obesity can be quite insensible to the sneers and remarks of the cruel and injudicious in public assemblies, public vehicles, or the ordinary street traffic.”

Frequent Turkish baths held out a promise of results for a while.

“Believing I had found the ‘philosopher’s stone’, I pursued them three times a week till I had taken 50,” he wrote.

But the baths had no long-lasting effect.

Despairing that his “sight (was) failing” and his “hearing greatly impaired”, he at last found Dr William Harvey of Soho Square, London.

Harvey told Banting his complaints were caused by his weight, and to get better he had to cut starch and sugar from his diet.

At first Banting thought that he wouldn’t have much left to live on without bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes.

“(These) had been the main – and, I thought, innocent – elements of my existence,” he wrote.

But within a week he had found “immense benefit” from his new diet.

Instead of starch for breakfast he ate 120 to 140g of either beef, mutton, kidneys, broiled fish or cold meat, with sugarless milkless tea, a biscuit or a slice of toast.

The original Banting diet is different from that proposed by Noakes.

For one, Banting ate a lot of fruit. He also enjoyed a “special corrective cordial” called “The Balm of Life”, a type of tonic he would sip throughout the day.

His pamphlet ran into many editions, where he would update his weight loss, which amounted to 20kg after one year.

Its success was lasting.

“Everyone is acquainted with the principles of the ‘Banting system’,” wrote the New York Times in the article “How to get thin” in October 1883, 20 years after Banting’s letter was first published.

Banting’s limited carbohydrate diet has since inspired many new diets.

In the early 1960s, for example, a British doctor named Richard Mackarness published the book Eat Fat And Grow Slim, with the subtitle “Banting up to date”.

“Starch and sugar are the culprits,” he told the press. “Cut them down, and eat fat and protein.”

Starting in the late 1970s, another doctor, Robert Atkins, drew inspiration from Banting for his take on the low-carbohydrate diet.

His first book, Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution (the High Calorie Way to Stay Thin Forever), launched Atkins on his successful career as a diet-adviser.

One of the more recent books to take up the mantle was 2007’s Good Calories, Bad Calories by US journalist Gary Taubes, a correspondent for Science magazine.

His book opens with a passage from a British Medical Journal article from Banting’s day, which shows the undertaker’s diet was as popular then as it is today.

“The emperor of the French is trying the Banting system and is said to have already profited greatly thereby.”

Jan Cronje, Weekend Argus

[email protected]

Related Topics: