The Way We Eat Now

From the Harvard Magazine

Although flawed in places (e.g. the footnote 'Inner Wisdom'), this is a great summary of what went wrong over the latter part of the last century:

The Way We Eat Now

Meat-eating was essential for human evolution

By Patricia McBroom, Public Affairs

BERKELEY-- Human ancestors who roamed the dry and open savannas of Africa about 2 million years ago routinely began to include meat in their diets to compensate for a serious decline in the quality of plant foods, according to a physical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

It was this new meat diet, full of densely-packed nutrients, that provided the catalyst for human evolution, particularly the growth of the brain, said Katharine Milton, an authority on primate diet.

Without meat, said Milton, it's unlikely that proto humans could have secured enough energy and nutrition from the plants available in their African environment at that time to evolve into the active, sociable, intelligent creatures they became.

Read full article: berkeley.edu

Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 71, No. 3, 682-692, March 2000
© 2000 American Society for Clinical Nutrition

Loren Cordain, Janette Brand Miller, S Boyd Eaton, Neil Mann, Susanne HA Holt and John D Speth

From the Department of Health and Exercise Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins; the Human Nutrition Unit, Department of Biochemistry, University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; the Departments of Radiology and Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta; the Department of Food Science, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Melbourne, Australia; and the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Abstract
Both anthropologists and nutritionists have long recognized that the diets of modern-day hunter-gatherers may represent a reference standard for modern human nutrition and a model for defense against certain diseases of affluence. Because the hunter-gatherer way of life is now probably extinct in its purely un-Westernized form, nutritionists and anthropologists must rely on indirect procedures to reconstruct the traditional diet of preagricultural humans. In this analysis, we incorporate the most recent ethnographic compilation of plant-to-animal economic subsistence patterns of hunter-gatherers to estimate likely dietary macronutrient intakes (% of energy) for environmentally diverse hunter-gatherer populations. Furthermore, we show how differences in the percentage of body fat in prey animals would alter protein intakes in hunter-gatherers and how a maximal protein ceiling influences the selection of other macronutrients. Our analysis showed that whenever and wherever it was ecologically possible, hunter-gatherers consumed high amounts (45–65% of energy) of animal food. Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (56–65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived >50% (56–65% of energy) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. This high reliance on animal-based foods coupled with the relatively low carbohydrate content of wild plant foods produces universally characteristic macronutrient consumption ratios in which protein is elevated (19–35% of energy) at the expense of carbohydrates (22–40% of energy).

Read full article here: AJCN

Hunter-Gatherers, Low-carb Diets, and Adrenalin

Full article by Anthony Colpo: The Omnivore

Diseases caused by sugar poisoning (1910)

By George M. Gould, M.D. of Ithaca, N.Y.
First Published in MEDICAL REVIEW OF REVIEWS - July 1910

Here's an article written in 1910 that predicted the problems Americans would have with high sugar, refined flour diets.

It has lately been urged, and from a medical standpoint, that everyone could eat any amount of sugar, saccharine foods, candy, and starchy foods, not only without harm to health, but with positive physiologic advantage. In view of the five hundred millions of dollars said to be expended annually in sugar by the United States, and in view of the little known---probably more suspected---as to the evils and causes of the prevalence of diabetes, such nonsense should need no argument to make its fallacy evident.

Almost every second store and shop in our villages and cities is a candy store, and common sense and common observation knows well enough the morbid results. Out of the American debauch in candy and sweets, breakfast-foods and sugar, wheat-cakes and molasses, we shall later have to win our way to health and good dietetic sense with painful experience.

The exacting questions, of course, remain: As to long-continued morbid habits of diet, especially in the case of children and city-dwellers; with the sedentary, in those with weakened nervous and nutritional systems, when coexisting with other diseases, or in the cases of other active and co-operating causes of disease.

For several years it has been growing clearer to me that many patients do not get well because they live too exclusively on sugary and starchy foods. With greater activity and the resisting power of youth, children exhibit the morbid tendency by excessive "nervousness." denutrition, ease-of-becoming ill, and by many ague and warning symptoms. I have asked the parents of such children to stop them in their use of all sweets, and most starches and almost immediately there was a most gratifying disappearance of the "nervousness," fickleness of appetite, "colds," and vague manifold ailments.

In another class of patients it was this way: There was only an incomplete disappearance of those symptoms generally due to eyestrain or back strain. With the correction of eyestrain, for instance, there was a sudden disappearance of the chief complaints, but followed by a provoking return of some of them. There was only, say, a three-fourth of non-cure remaining to torment. In such cases I exact a promise that for one or two months sugar and sweets shall be absolutely discontinued, and of the starches, the least possible use (no potatoes, surely)---a little toasted brown bread only, for instance.

How many patients have blessed me for the suggestion, and have traced to the continued rules, their reinstated health and enjoyment of life. Those who have learned to recognize the value of such hygienic preventions of disease will test the suggestion; those who observe only the organic end-products in aberrant physiology and morbid function. Fashionable pathology concerns itself only with terminal disease, apparently oblivious of pathogenesis, and most of all, careless of the early and slight origins which led to mortem and post-mortem. It is left to chance and to faddism to make scientific the infinitely more important function of prevention.

But the evil effects of sugar-drowning will sometimes be recognized as still more important and varied than I have said. Among others, I have had two cases in which it was clear that a too exclusive or an exaggerated diet of sugary foods was a cause of epilepsy. The first was that of a boy of nine years of age in which correction of eyestrain brought no relief of both petit and grand mal attacks. Then by diligent inquiry I learned that the boy (who was morbidly nervous...almost insanely active) ate no meats, eggs, vegetables, etc., and lived, practically, on "cakes," a little breakfast food, etc., with enormous quantities of sugar, syrups, etc. Recovery followed a diet list which excluded the sweets.

Another patient, aged fifty-five, has been having many petit mal attacks for thirteen years, with occasional, typical grand mal seizures. He was a watchmaker, and wearing no correction of his compound hyperopic astiginatism. I found that he ate sweets inordinately, which, upon being interdicted, the attacks immediately grew less in number and severity, with no major ones, and the rare minor ones scarcely noticeable, until they disappeared and there was a return of hope, a zest in life; as he enthusiastically says, he "Feels like a new man now." In consideration of his age, the results are noteworthy.

This article was printed in Natural Ovens of Manitowoc, Wisconsin newsletter, "Natural News." Comments by Barbara Stitt, co-owner of Manitowoc Ovens and author of 'Food and Behavior': It is amazing that Dr. Gould described hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder so accurately 89 years ago in 1910. The refining of wheat flour had only reached the U.S. in the late 1800's! By ignoring the wise advice in 1910, the people in our beautiful country spent over $1.3 trillion in medical care in 1995.

Legacy of a fat man

Devoured by dieters, decried by doctors and on every bestseller list, the Atkins plan has transformed the world of weight loss. But it's not as new as it seems. As Greg Critser found, our meaty, low-carb love affair began with a voluminous Victorian named William Banting - and the diet guru who made him slim

Read full article: Guardian Unlimited

Carnivore/Herbivore

The design of our digestive organs and digestive enzymes today

In The Naive Vegetarian, I talked about Man's evolution and the sorts of food which the fossil record suggests we should eat and what modern primitives, untouched by civilisation eat. This all points to our being a carnivorous species. The third aspect of the evidence confirms this hypothesis by looking at our digestive system and comparing it with those of animals whose diet is known beyond doubt.

There are basically two types of animals in Nature:

1. Herbivores: animals that eat vegetation. They are able to digest and use as food the cellulose which forms the cell walls of all plants.
2. Carnivores: animals that eat herbivores. The carnivore's digestion is unable break down vegetable cell walls.

Read the full article here: second-opinions.co.uk

Mr Banting's Old Diet Revolution

Charlotte Edwardes reveals how a short, fat Victorian funeral director became a household name with a dietary regime amazingly similar to the most current food fad.

On the August morning that he began his diet, 26 years into the reign of Queen Victoria, the short and very fat William Banting heaved himself out of bed at 8am, hoisted a corset around his bulging stomach and struggled into his three-piece suit. Unable to reach his laces, he gingerly eased his feet into his shoes with a boot hook - taking care as he stooped not to stress the angry boils on his buttocks.

As he negotiated the stairs in reverse (a method, he found, that eased the crushing pressure on his knees), he was looking forward to the cooked breakfast awaiting in the dining room below - but dreading the effect it would have on his ever-ballooning bulk.

Twelve months later, the 5ft 5in Mr Banting had shed more than three stone to be a slightly portly 11 stone. It was 1863 and Banting declared the diet "simply miraculous". So evangelical was Banting in extolling and promoting the virtues of his diet that he became a household name: the verb, to bant, meaning to diet, was absorbed into the vernacular and appeared in the Oxford dictionary until 1963...

Read full article: telegraph.co.uk

Eat Fat And Grow Slim

by Richard Mackarness, M.B.,B.S. (1958)

From the Foreword by Sir Heneage Ogilvie, KBE, DM, M CH, FRCS
Consultant Surgeon, Guy's Hospital, Editor of 'The Practitioner'
Late: Vice-President of the Royal College of Surgeons

THE STATISTICIAN looks on nutrition as a mater of calories, and on obesity as a question of upset caloric equilibrium. A calorie is a unit of heat, a unit of potential energy, but not a unit of nutrition. Prison governors, school superintendents, dictators whether of a nation or of a small community, talk in calories to prove that they are feeding their charges or their victims adequately. Fellows of the Royal Society, and doctors with political leanings, talk in calories as if the human body were a machine requiring a certain amount of fuel to enable it to do a certain amount of work.

A motor-car needs calories, and we give it calories in the form of petrol. If we give it good petrol it will do good work for quite a long time. But even a Rolls-Royce cannot find its own fuel. It cannot separate motor spirit and lubricating oil from the crude mixture brought by a tanker from the wells of Kuwait. It cannot clean its own pipes, clear its own choked jets, grind its own valves, re-line its own bearings when they are worn, and replace defective parts as they need renewal. The body can do all these things. but the body is not a machine, and to do them it needs food not fuel...

Full access to the book here: Eat Fat And Grow Slim

William Banting: Letter on Corpulence

LETTER ON CORPULENCE
Addressed to the Public
By WILLIAM BANTING.
FOURTH EDITION
WITH PREFATORY REMARKS BY THE AUTHOUR

COPIOUS INFORMATION FROM CORRESPONDENTS AND CONFIRMATORY EVIDENCE OF THE BENEFIT OF THE DIETARY SYSTEM WHICH HE RECOMMENDED TO PUBLIC NOTICE

LONDON
PUBLISHED BY HARRISON, 59, PALL MALL
Bookseller to the Queen and H.R.H. the Prince of Wales
1869
PRICE ONE SHILLING

Read the whole booklet here: Lowcarber.ca

Banting, The Father of the Low-Carbohydrate Diet

The following article was awarded the Sophie Coe Prize at the 2002 Oxford Symposium on Food History (aka the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking). The Symposium was held at St Antony's College, Oxford, over the weekend 7 and 8 September 2002.

The Prize, in memory of Sophie Coe, the distinguished food historian who died in 1994, is awarded annually under the auspices of the Oxford Symposium for an essay or article on some aspect of food history, embodying new research or providing new insights.

WILLIAM BANTING (1796-1878):
The Father of the Low-Carbohydrate Diet

Summary
For two decades 'healthy eating' propaganda has influenced the way we eat. Over the same period there has been a consequent dramatic rise in obesity and associated conditions. This has led to a backlash which has seen a rash of diet books advocating high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets described as 'new' and 'revolutionary'.

But in reality, they are not. The first low-carbohydrate diet book was written in 1863 by William Banting as a service to his fellow Man. His name passed into the language as the verb 'to bant'.

That the 'Banting diet' works has been attested to by 140 years of epidemiological studies and clinical trials.

For the sake of our health, it is time we started 'banting' again.

Full article: Second Opinions - Barry Groves, PhD