Art Devany posted this yesterday:

This was written by George Harley, MD (1829-1896) while at University College Hospital, London.

... let me explain that by the term restricted diet we mean not only the avoidance of all sugars, and substances containing saccarine matter, but also of all kinds of food convertible during the process of digestion into sugar. The foods convertible into sugar in the digestive canal are those containing starch (not gums), such as arrowroot, tapioca, sago, flours of all the different kinds of cereals (wheat, barley, oats, peas, beans, etc.), potatoes, carrots, beetroot. parsnips, turnips, and other edible roots.

Green vegetables, on the other hand, such as spinach, cabbage, turnip tops, Brussels sprouts, and lettuce need not be forbidden, as they contain too small an amount of starch to do much injury.

As for animal foods, on the other hand, every imaginable fish, flesh, and fowl may be indulged in, so that even on the most restricted diet the patient has still a large margin for selection - beef, mutton, pork, venison, poultry. game, and wild fowl, oysters, lobster, crabs, prawns, salmon, cod, turbot, etc., Iceland and Ireland Moss, calf's foot or gelatine jellies, butter sauces and salad oils. The only true hardship, in fact, the patient suffers is the deprivation of ordinary bread, and that appears to be a more severe one than most people imagine. I have known patients in whom the craving became at last almost intolerable, its as if nature were crying out for some indispensible element of food. In order to mitigate this hardship, a great number of plans of depriving bread of the forbidden element, starch, have been suggested, and many of them have been in a great measure successful. Thus, we have bran, gluten and glycerine breads and biscuits constantly kept in stock by many of our London bakers.

After a time patients get very tired of these substitutes, so it is as well to know that we may occasionally indulge them with well done toast, or very crisp pulled bread, the extra heat having destroyed a considerable portion of the starch normally contained in the article.

Even in the most favourable cases for restricted diet, we must never allow ourselves to be deluded into the idea that, because we are mitigating the symptoms, and reducing the amount of sugar in the urine, we are necessarily curing the disease, or we shall frequently be be doomed to sad disappointment. In keeping the patient on restricted diet, we are merely witholding from him the straw and mortar out of which the bricks are made - not removing the makers - so that, as soon as the straw and mortar is refurnished to them, they will again be found at work as actively as ever.

Source:
Harley, George. 1866. Diabetes: Its various forms and different treatments. London: Walton and Maberly.

It looks as though much has been forgotten in the last 140 years.

Not even that long. My dad graduated from medical school in the late 1920's and tells me that a carb restricted diet was still the treatment of choice for diabetes even then. It wasn't until the advent of reliable and safe insulin that the diet of diabetics began to evolve into what it is today.
Insulin was first used in a patient in 1923 but the carb restricted diet remained until much later.
Now the advice handed out to many diabetics isn't to restrict carbs but that they are 'healthy' and 'needed' and that they don't need to be afraid of sugar as long as they 'cover' it with sufficient medication. I wonder how many diabetics who follow that advice fully realize that the tradeoff of using medicine in that manner may very well wind up costing them their eyesight or their kidneys or worse.

Awesome!

That's pretty much my diet, except for the burnt toast!

That even pre-dates Banting's low carb diet. Very interesting to know that these wasy of eating are not new, only forgotten or out of favor.

I wonder how long and how well a truly diabetic person would survive on a low carb diet? There must have been some impetus for the development of injectable insulin as a method of treatment. I suppose it might simply have been the clamor for bread by the patients.

tom,

there was this nice article from last year where 2 T1 diabetic brothers, aged 86 and 90, shared their life-long experience with diabetes.


http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...agewanted=print


Money quote:

The standard advice for diabetics is low fat, high carb. Follow the food pyramid. Get 50 - 60% of your calories from carbohydrates and eat 6 - 11 servings of starches per day. I see it everywhere I look. Diets with less than 130 grams of carbs are NOT recommended by the American Diabetes Association. Hey, the ADA even says that diabetics can eat what non-diabetics eat, including sugar. After all, sugar is no worse than starches when it comes to blood sugar control.

Funny, I used to eat that way. I was plagued by insatiable cravings, which I tried to satisfy with "healthy carbs." I just got fatter and ended up diabetic. Now that I largely ignore the standard dietary advice for diabetics, I'm getting better. My take is that starches are as bad as sugar for blood sugar control.

Diabetes care isn't improving. Complications from diabetes cost $22 Billion per year. Yet the medical establishment doesn't get it. They can only blame diabetics -- if they would only follow our advice. Hello....Maybe your advice is the problem.

Banting's diet was prescribed to him by a doctor that had studied diabetic diets in France.

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/fat/chap1.htm

He did ate fruit and some toast, but avoided starches and sweets. Lots of booze though, I crave alcohol when carbs are severly restricted too.
Overall, interesting reading.