Obesity: Thinking Outside the Box

The following story was brought to my attention by science journalist Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, which is my favorite book of the year. Here’s the story:

A fashionable and prosperous London businessman suffered for many years with obesity so extreme that he could not tie his own shoes, and he had to walk down stairs backwards to avoid jarring his knees. He visited doctor after doctor, tried every fad diet he could find, and exercised like a professional athlete, but still the excess fat clung to his body.

He grew hard of hearing, suffered indigestion, and had constant aches and pains. Then by chance he saw an ear doctor who had recently attended a diabetes conference in France; this ear doctor told our beleaguered businessman that the cause of his corpulence was carbohydrates – starches and sugars. He suggested some very basic dietary guidelines. And it worked. It worked like a charm.

William Banting, the London businessman afflicted with the discomforts of obesity, simply stopped eating starchy and sweet foods, enjoyed four meals per day, did not count calories, did not go out of his way to exercise -- and swiftly corrected his body’s imbalance. Within weeks he felt remarkably better. Within one year he was at a comfortable weight, without pains or indigestion, and he was thrilled.

He was so delighted that he self-published a book giving all the details. It sold out immediately. He had it reprinted. It sold out again. He reprinted it at least three times in the first year alone. A year later, he published a revised edition which included excerpts from the thousands of letters he had received from delighted and grateful readers. He gave away profits from the book to local charities.

His name entered the English language as a verb: when a person was “banting,” they were overcoming obesity by following a low-carbohydrate, moderate-fat diet.

The most amazing part is that this enlightening event occurred in 1864-65, over 140 years ago.

To see or download the 1864 book “A Letter on Corpulence” by William Banting, which is now copyright-free, click here (thanks to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). To see or download the 1865 version of the book, with additional material from grateful readers -- as well as critical reviews from Harper’s Weekly and Blackwood’s Magazine, click here (thanks to Google books).

One contemporaneous book review, included in the 1865 book, was critical of Banting’s point of view: “Orthodoxy is allied to plumpness, and a certain breadth of beam is most becoming to a high dignitary of the church. In the man of portly presence… we can repose implicit trust…” This same review later concludes, “We rise from the perusal of Mr. Banting’s pamphlet with our belief quite unshaken in the value of bread and potatoes as ordinary and universal articles of diet… Starch and sugar are eminently nutritious…”

The concept of strict carbohydrate restriction as a cure for obesity raised disbelieving, mocking opposition. “I just don’t believe it” was then (and still is) the most common criticism. This response is based upon comfortable familiarity with the status quo rather than on unbiased observation and research. Thinking outside the box entails challenging conventional wisdom, while the cure for obesity may require banting outside the box.

-Dr. Deborah McKay, Naturopathic Physician