Mon, Mar-23-20, 12:24
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Senior Member
Posts: 14,602
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Plan: EpiPaleo/Primal/LowOx
Stats: 220/125/150
BF:
Progress: 136%
Location: USA
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The Portly Victorian Undertaker Who Launched the World’s First Low-Carb Craze
This is actually a good article. Surprise, surprise, surprise! (Yes, I was a Gomer Pyle fan as a youngling.)
I stunned our new doctor, a self-proclaimed "keto fan," was stunned when I knew what Banting was, and who he was.
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It was not just a funeral — it was an event. And it was all thanks to William Banting, a well-to-do London cabinetmaker and undertaker whose elaborate burials turned royal deaths into massive public spectacles. Banting, and his father before him, had prepared memorials for generations of British dignitaries, from King George to Lord Nelson, but despite the magnitude of these contributions to king and country, his name is remembered today not for the mahogany coffins and prancing stallions, but the fact that he became an unwitting diet guru.
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Banting tried everything, some of the attempts in the article are scary like The Biggest Loser. Nothing new under the sun, right?
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By 1862, Banting was plainly in a bad way. He couldn’t reach his own shoes to tie them in the morning. Prone to light-headedness, he would go down stairs backward — wheezing and teetering slowly with each step — in order to minimize stress on his ankles and knees. He held in a painful hernia with a tight truss, and his vision and hearing were starting to suffer.
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We can all guess he was dealing with metabolic disease, which leaves no system undamaged.
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[Dr.] Harvey had recently attended a medical conference where the physician — Claude Bernard, known today for his work on the body’s natural state of equilibrium — had discussed metabolism as it might affect diabetes management. Inspired, Harvey decided to think beyond his patient’s ears.
Dr. Harvey urged his client to follow a new diet that de-emphasized starchy or sweet foods, which he believed tended to create fat. Banting, who was used to lavishly buttered toast, beer, meat and pastries on a regular daily rotation, grumbled that there would hardly be anything left in the world for him to eat, so the doctor drafted him a meal plan.
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Remember, this was a well-off gentleman who could afford to try anything and everything. This time, it worked.
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Then Banting thought about how to share his good fortune with the public. He considered writing a letter to The Lancet medical journal or a popular magazine, but without the proper pedigree or introductions to recommend him, they were likely to toss it aside unread. He ultimately decided to self-publish a pamphlet entitled “Letter on Corpulence: Addressed to the Public.”
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And the rest is something of history. I also liked the way the article summed up:
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Perhaps the largest takeaway for modern readers is that, in dieting terms, there’s little new under the sun. Regimens like Whole30 and Paleo are themselves revised versions of Atkins, which in turn tips its hat back to Banting. And in each generation that embraces the low-carb craze, there are commonalities, not least of which is that the same fanatic level of devotion and criticism has characterized each resurrection of the diet plan.
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It also pointed out that Banting made not a penny from his best-selling pamphlet, donating all proceeds to charity.
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