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Originally Posted by JEY100
Last night I finished a good book that has nothing to do with low carb, but the coach had the answer to sugar addiction.
Dust Bowl Girls: The Boys in the Boat meets A League of Their Own in this true story of a Depression-era championship women’s basketball team.
The coach had nine rules. 2 was "Girls will maintain a proper diet. They will not skip meals. They will drink lots of water.
3 Players will not eat any sweets during basketball season. No bananas."
Other rules on curfew and sleep and exercise...but I was struck by the no sweets rule in 1932. No idea why the banana too...starchy and sweet?
The team accepted "no sweets" as common sense even though they exercised hard about three and half hours a day. In conversation about the poor surviving on cornbread and sorghum syrup, the girls noted that if the coach "ever saw any of his players touching the stuff, he'd suspend them from the team since one of his rules was the strict avoidance of all things sweet." The rare time a girl was sent fudge, or sneaked a teaspoon of sugar for coffee, it was noted in their dairies and so the book. I can only imagine the No Sweets rule was considered standard health advice for athletes, but whatever, a bright line rule they didn’t cross and end of "addiction" or 'sweet tooth' as one called it.
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From what I've read, back before WWII, Germany had done a lot of research on diet, and found that LC was best, for the exact same reasons we on this forum find it to be best. But wherever I read that, it also said that due to the complete horror of the holocaust, any research done by Nazi Germany, no matter how valid, was disdained, thrown out, as being completely unreliable, which helped pave the way for Keyes lipid theory, and the push for more carbs.
Still, our grandparents (I'm in my 60's, so we're talking about at least 50+ years ago) knew that carbs made you gain weight - the diet plates at restaurants usually consisted of a hamburger patty (it wasn't the least bit unusual for ground beef to be 30% fat - 15% fat was the lowest fat version available in the stores), a scoop of full fat cottage cheese, and a tomato slice or two, served on lettuce. It wasn't until the 80's, when the LF craze started that the diet plate was changed to green salad, fat free dressing, or a bunch of carbs, a tiny serving of boneless, skinless chicken breast, and almost no fat.
As far as bananas being off the diet for that team, I'm thinking it might have been part of keeping their body fluids balanced - drink lots of water to counteract excess perspiration from all the training. But since bananas are touted as having a lot of potassium, and extra potassium can cause increased urination, that could have conceivably upset the balance. Also, if any of the girls were obsessed with their weight (which would go along with the rule that they not allowed to skip meals), they could have tried to use bananas to help rid themselves of what they considered to be excess fluid.
But as you said, it could also have been the sugar content of bananas - they may have even found that eliminating such a sweet fruit from the diet helped curb any cravings for other sweets.