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Low-carb dieting did not begin with Atkins. Sure, Robert Atkins was the best-known low-carb theorist, and he created the most successful diet, described in The New Diet Revolution published in 1972. But the first bona fide low-carb diet book actually came out in 1864.

That book only happened because William Banting thought he was going deaf. Banting was a prosperous London undertaker of 66 who stood only 5 feet 5 inches but weighed 202 pounds. In 1862 Banting took himself to an ear, nose, and throat surgeon named Dr. William Harvey, who promptly decided that Banting’s problem wasn’t deafness; it was obesity. Fat was pressing on his inner ear.

Dr. Harvey banished from his client’s diet all starch and sugar, forbade beer and potatoes, and left the undertaker to exist on meat, fish, vegetables, and wine, with an occasional crust of toast. Banting lost 100 pounds. Inspired by his results on this high-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet, Banting published in 1869, at his own expense, the first commercial low-carb diet book, Letter on Corpulence. Banting’s book began the nascent debate–“Is it what we eat or how much we eat that makes us fat?”. The debate accelerated when Wilbur Atwater invented the calorie.

The First Calorie Counter

Sometime between 1890 and 1900 an agricultural chemist named Wilbur Atwater figured out that if you burned food to ash in a little oven called a calorimeter, you could measure the amount of heat it produced. He called the unit of measurement a calorie and constructed vast tables of the caloric content of food. The idea that we all “burn” calories has been the dominating hypothesis in weight loss to this day.

Other scientists began to measure how much heat was produced (read: how many calories were “burned”) in the course of daily activities, from resting to vigorous exercise to digesting food to running marathons. It was now possible to form an equation: calories in versus calories out. The guiding concept of weight management was officially born.

The theory, called the energy balance theory, goes something like this: if you take in more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. If you burn more calories than you take in, you’ll lose weight. It doesn’t matter where those calories come from.

Yet Banting, unscientific though he was, had made an interesting observation: what he ate made more of a difference to his fat cells than how much he ate. While no low-carb theorist of today would deny that calories are important, we also believe that the kind of calories we eat determines our hormonal response to food and our tendency to store or release fat.

Slimming at DuPont

Shortly after the First World War, the large American chemical firm E.I. DuPont, became concerned about the growing obesity problem among their staff. They hired Dr. Alfred Pennington to find out why traditional low-calorie diets were bombing. Pennington concluded that our old friend, the formerly fat undertaker William Banting, was right all along. Obesity, Pennington decided, was due not to overeating but instead to the body’s inability to use carbohydrates for anything other than making fat.

Pennington put DuPont executives on a high-fat, high-protein, low-carbohydrate unrestricted-calorie diet. His dieters reported they felt well, enjoyed their meals, and were never hungry between meals. The 20 obese individuals he treated lost an average of 22 pounds each, in an average time of three-and-a-half months.

Inuit Do It

Jonny Bowden, MA, CNS, is a nationally recognized expert on lower carbohydrate eating plans. and the author of Living the Low Carb Life (Sterling, 2004). jonnybowden.com. Editor’s note: This article appeared in totalhealth magazine and was adapted from Jonny Bowden’s new best selling book, Living the Low Carb Life: Choosing the Diet That’s Right for You from Atkins to Zone (Sterling, 2004).

Source: alive #267, January 2005