There are many benefits to weight loss, especially if you are overweight or obese. Benefits include but are not limited to, improved longevity, a decreased risk for Cardiovascular disease (CVD), a decreased risk for cancer, decreased risk of type II diabetes, enhanced quality of life, and let’s not forget the obvious one—looking sexy.
I should point out that these benefits can be accomplished regardless of the type of diet you implement.
Simply losing body fat and weight overall has a huge impact on all of these outcomes, REGARDLESS of the type of diet you use.
Indeed, high carbohydrate, low-fat diets that produce weight loss can also include health benefits. In contrast, low carbohydrate, high-fat diets have also shown similar health benefits when weight loss is achieved.
More moderate diets? Same deal. Vegan? You bet it does, if it produces weight loss.
We can’t name one person we’ve known who hasn’t been on or claimed to be on at least one diet in their lifetime. There are as many diets that claim to be the answer to all our problems as there are stars in the sky.
Speaking of the sky, did I mention there is a “Lunar Diet?” Seriously, I am not making this up.
Want us to get weird? How about the “Avoiding Swamps Diet?”
In the 1700s Thomas Short observed that more fat people lived near swamps and hypothesized that avoiding them may be the key to staying lean.
“The Tapeworm Diet” is still a thing, too. Apparently, people think it’s a good idea to ingest parasites so that they can eat what they want and lose weight.
Enjoy your alcohol? Get on “The Drinking Man’s Diet” where there are no restrictions on gin and vodka. Don’t laugh. Robert Cameron sold over 2 million copies of this diet in the 1960s. That might have been a diet of sin, but what about a diet void of sin?
Sylvester Graham was a minister who believed that people were fat because they had too much sex. In the 1800s, he promoted The Graham Diet (vegetarian) and if his last name seems familiar, it’s because he was the father of the Graham Cracker. You heard it here, Graham Crackers were developed in an effort to reduce obesity and stop people from having sex.
Today, some of the more popular diets are the
Blood Type diet,
Alkaline Diet,
Paleo Diet,
Carnivore diet,
Ornish diet,
Atkins Diet,
Snake Diet (am not making this one up either),
The Zone Diet,
South Beach Diet,
The Ketogenic Diet,
The Mediterranean Diet,
and the list goes on and on.
Some of these diets have legitimate benefits and some are straight-up fads. In fact, let’s take a look at low-carb dieting. At the time of this writing, it’s en vogue. You can barely go out in the world or on the internet without talking to someone who is “on keto” or going low carb.
Some might remember a popular diet in the late 20th century/early 21st century called the Atkins Diet. Maybe your parents were on the Atkins Diet,
Now, if any of you reading this are lucky enough to have been alive in the middle of the 19th century, right around the 1860s, you might remember the first low-carb diet. It all started with an undertaker.
This undertaker thought fatness was a problem. So, William Banting, the 19th-century English undertaker, wrote a letter called Letter on Fatness, Addressed to the Public. Now, we must give a certain amount of credit to Banting. He said:
It would afford me infinite pleasure and satisfaction to name the author of my redemption from the calamity, as he is the only one that I have been able to find (and my search has not been sparing) who seems thoroughly up in the question; but such publicity might be construed improperly, and I have, therefore, only to offer my personal experience as the steppingstone to a public investigation, and to proceed with my narrative of facts, earnestly hoping the reader will patiently peruse and thoughtfully consider it, with forbearance for any fault of style or diction, and for any seeming presumption in publishing it.*1
Despite how happy he was on the low-carb diet, he didn’t proclaim it to be a cure-all. He, in a truly scientific fashion, observed something and questioned whether the results were repeatable by saying he hopes his experience can be a stepping-stone to more research.
We should expect no less from a man who handled embalming fluids and dead bodies.
In August of 1862, the 5’5 202 lb (91.6 kg) Banting embarked on his low carbohydrate diet and dropped 35 lbs (15kg) to a lean 167 lbs (75kg).
Banting even goes on to list his restricted foods. It’s worth noting that both milk and butter are on his banned food list, but those foods aren’t high carbohydrate foods.
Butter and milk have quite a bit of fat in them. In the literary world, this is foreshadowing. I’ll talk about why the fat content of these foods matters, and then you’ll see why Banting was successful on
this diet.
But there was more than just butter and milk to rid himself of. Bread, sugar, beer, and potatoes were on the list, too.
So, now that Banting’s diet had all the greatness stripped from it, what was left? Well, he was still allowed to drink gin for a nightcap, or a glass or two of sherry. Not only that, his meal plan looked like this:
• For breakfast, I take four or five ounces of beef, mutton, kidneys, broiled fish, bacon, or cold meat of any kind except pork
• a large cup of tea (without milk or sugar) * a fit tie biscuit, or one ounce of dry toast.
• For dinner, five or six ounces of any fish except salmon, any meat except pork, any vegetable except potato, one ounce of dry toast, fruit out of a pudding, any kind of poultry or game, and two or three glasses of good claret, sherry, or Madeira — Champagne, Port, and Beer are forbidden.
• For tea. Two or three ounces of fruit, a rusk or two, and a cup of tea without milk or sugar.
• For supper. Three or four ounces of meat or fish, similar to dinner, with a glass or two of claret.
• For the nightcap, if required, A tumbler of grog (gin, whisky, or brandy, without sugar) or a glass or two of claret or sherry.*2
In sum, using that protocol, Banting did pretty well for himself. Then he got so pumped over his success that he wanted to share it with the rest of the world via his letter.
Finally, he noted in his conclusion that he was able to achieve a happy medium where he maintained his weight within a few pounds.
He even stated that he was able to eat some of those once-forbidden foods, though in moderation. In many ways, Banting was onto something. Caring about your weight, especially as you advance in years, is a good thing.
I know it’s hip to hate the BMI chart, but there is an association between being bigger and all-cause mortality.*3 Further, obesity is linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, osteoarthritis, liver disease, kidney disease, and depression. And, according to the previously mentioned BMI chart, so is anything above 30 kilograms per meter squared (kg/m²).*4
Banting wasn’t the only one who was concerned with dietary intake. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother William Keith Kellogg were deeply concerned with the topic.
If the name looks familiar, it’s because you’re no doubt familiar with many of their current modern culinary masterpieces, like Pop-Tarts and Corn Flakes.
While Pop-Tarts might be new, Corn Flakes have a history that dates back over a century to a place called Battle Creek, Michigan. There, the Kellogg brothers ran a health resort called the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which espoused the health principles of the Seventh-day Adventists.*5 Unlike Banting’s prototype for a low-carb diet, Ellen White—one of the founders of the Seventh-day Adventists who advocated for these principles of health—was a proponent of a vegetarian diet.
According to her estate, people who ate meat were more at risk for disease and early death. Moreover, White believed coffee and tea “[are] a sin, an injurious indulgence.”*6 Unlike Banting’s diet, whole grains were a preferred source of sustenance because of the dietary fiber, and the fact that grains were not meat products. In addition to that, the sanitarium focused on physical training for the under- and overweight.*7
There’s a lot more we could say about the Kellogg brothers’ impact on culture. Here are a few takeaways, mainly to show you how the ideology becomes cultural and how we start to accept it:
• John Harvey Kellogg popularized exercising to music because he added it to the routine after his patients at the hospital thought regular exercise was boring
• He realized people absolutely hated the vegetarian diet and had his brother Will Keith hone the recipe for the cereal we have today
• The brothers came up with marketing tactics to get people to spread the good news by word of mouth, like wearing all-white outfits to absorb the health benefits sunlight provides.
Kellogg is also interesting because, as you have seen, he held deeply puritanical religious beliefs. This lead him on an anti-sex crusade, which was so extreme that he never consummated his own marriage and was fervently against onanism (the common word back then for masturbation).*8 That said, we see similar things occur today.
People develop beliefs, and they look for the science to justify them, rather than the other way around. They, for lack of a better term, put the round peg into the square hole.
This is very much the same mechanism for fad diets today.
Not only have you been around long enough to have diets marketed to you, but you’ve also been around long enough to know that the world is getting a bit heftier, and you know the implications of that added heft. If you’ve ever been in a position where a doctor told you to lose weight, you might have gotten some nebulous methodology on how to go about this:
1. Consume no more than 1200 calories a day
2. Eat low carb
3. Eat low fat
4. Go vegan
5. Go vegetarian
In general, there’s nothing wholly wrong with any of those methods. There will exist some humans who can and should eat 1200 calories a day.
There might also be some people who really like potatoes and could thrive on a low-fat diet. But it’s inaccurate to make blanket statements about what everyone should do.
Later in this blog series, I’ll talk about why the fads work in the short term but fail in the long term. I’ll also discuss how to build sustainable habits you can use in your life.
Unlike most others, we won’t blame the doctor. The doctor is there to practice medicine. So, in addition to covering myself, I want to be honest: I (Muhammed sanoob) am not a medical professional, absolutely none of this blog is meant to be construed as medical advice, and as always, consult your physician before starting any type of diet or exercise program.
End of Part 2.
*1 (n.d.). Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public – Wiley Online Library. Retrieved August 21, 2018, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.1550-8528.1993.tb00605.x
*2 (n.d.). Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public – Wiley Online Library. Retrieved August 21, 2018, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.1550-8528.1993.tb00605.x
*3 (n.d.). Body-mass index and all-cause mortality: individual … – NCBI – NIH. Retrieved August 21, 2018, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4995441/
*4 (n.d.). The Medical Risks of Obesity – NCBI – NIH. Retrieved August 21, 2018, from https://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879283/
*5 Thompson, M. (Producer), & Perkins, J. (Writer). (2005). Kellogg Brothers: Corn Flake Kings[Video file]. New York, NY: A & E Television Networks. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgygIuf8b8E
*6 (n.d.). Chapter 28: Health Principles/5 – Reviewing a Century of Health …. Retrieved September 3, 2018, from http://www.whiteestate.org/books/mol/Chapt28.html
*7 Thompson, M. (Producer), & Perkins, J. (Writer). (2005). Kellogg Brothers: Corn Flake Kings[Video file]. New York, NY: A & E Television Networks. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgygIuf8b8E
*8 Thompson, M. (Producer), & Perkins, J. (Writer). (2005). Kellogg Brothers: Corn Flake Kings[Video file]. New York, NY: A & E Television Networks. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgygIuf8b8E
