Banting’s Letter on Corpulence
I was looking through my (as yet unorganized) library a couple of days ago and came across a couple of books that I thought I should blog about. After giving it some more thought I decided to start a series of posts on the books that I found most essential in my own low-carb reading. These would be the books that should make up the core of any good low-carber’s library. So here we are with the first post in the series.
Probably the most influential diet book of all time was not really a diet book, but a bound letter written by a satisfied patient. William Banting (1797-1878) was a middle-aged undertaker living in London who had become obese. He sought the help of multiple physicians and other practitioners who prescribed a variety of remedies for him, none of which worked. Or as he put it
I consulted…high orthodox authorities (never any inferior adviser), but all in vain. I have tried sea air and bathing in various localities, with much walking exercise, taken gallons of physic and liquor potassae, advisedly and abundantly; riding on horseback; the waters and climate of Leamington many times, as well as those of Cheltenham and Harrogate frequently; have lived upon sixpence a-say, so to speak, and earned it, if bodily labour may be so construed; and have spared no trouble nor expense in consultations with the best authorities in the land, giving each and all a fair time for experiment, without any permanent remedy, as the evil [his obesity] still gradually increased.
He tried all the above along with simple diets, i.e., low-calorie diets, without success. Despite all his efforts and all the advice of the many practitioners whose opinions he sought
the evil still increased, and, like the parasite of barnacles on a ship, if it did not destroy the structure, it obstructed its fair, comfortable progress in the path of life.
Banting finally fell into the hands of a physician who recommended a low-carb diet, or, in the words of the time, a diet lacking in starch and saccharine (sugar and sugar-sweetened foods) matter.
He took to his new diet with a gusto and began for the first time to lose substantial amounts of weight. As the months wore on, his fat dropped off. After about a nine months he had lost 35 pounds (which made a large difference as he was only 5′ 5″ 
tall) and was ecstatic. In fact, he was so fired up and had had enough people ask him about his regimen that he decided to publish at his own expense a small, bound pamphlet describing his own experiences that he could pass out gratis to anyone who wanted one.
The first printing of 1000 of these pamphlets that Banting called A Letter on Corpulence went fast. He then wrote an addendum and printed 1500 copies of this second edition and gave them all away. By this time the demand had become such that Banting didn’t want to continue the expense of printing these booklets, so he wrote yet another addendum, called it the third edition, and charged sixpence for it, which was enough to cover its cost. Banting’s Letter on Corpulence went through many more editions and started the first worldwide dietary movement.
So popular were Banting’s writings that his name became synonymous with dieting. In the UK people still often speak of banting when they are talking about dieting. Other languages picked it up and use bant or some variant as their word for dieting in general, not just low-carb dieting.
I happen to own an actual copy of the third edition of Banting’s Letter on Corpulence. I have scanned it and made it available online in its original size to anyone who wants it. So now you’ve got the first book for the core of your low-carb library. (Click here for your copy)
I reread this little gem before I decided to go to the effort to scan it and put it up (all of which was a giant pain in the rear), and discovered it to be a valuable addition to any low-carber’s library because – although it was written in 1864 – just about everything in it applies to our current situation. And before I put it up I searched online and found a number of sites that had PDF’s of (mainly) the 4th edition, but I didn’t enjoy reading those nearly as much as I did the actual pages. The Victorian prose went down more smoothly when read on yellowed Victorian pages with a bend in the middle made by someone who a hundred or so years ago folded it in half to stick in his pocket. I wanted readers of this blog to be able to have the same experience – or as close to that as possible, so go for it.
The whole thing takes about 15 minutes to read (maybe a half hour max) and is loaded with pearls of wisdom or explanations of situations many of us find ourselves in today.
I’ll go through just a few quotes from the Letter to show you what I mean.
One of the reasons Banting gives for writing the letter was because he was
earnestly hoping the subject may be taken up by medical men and thoroughly ventilated.
Fat chance. The medical establishment of the day was as pigheaded about low-carb dieting as the medical establishment is today. They basically sniffed at his book and pronounced it a fraud.
He has a great description of how obesity is regarded by both the public and the medical fraternity that rings true today.
Obesity seems to me very little understood or properly appreciated by the faculty and the public generally, or the former would long ere have hit upon the cause for so lamentable a disease, and applied effective remedies, whilst the latter would have spared their injudicious remarks and sneers, frequently painful in society, and which, even on the strongest mind, have an unhappy tendency.
And he – like thousands of patients I’ve seen over the years – describes how he got fat.
…my corpulence and subsequent obesity was not through neglect of necessary bodily activity, nor from excessive eating, drinking, or self-indulgence of any kind, except that I partook of the simple aliments of bread, milk, butter, beer, sugar, and potatoes more freely than my aged nature required, and hence, as I believe, the generation of the parasite, detrimental to comfort if not really to health.
Among the many prescriptions he got for reducing his bulk was this one to exercise.
I consulted an eminent surgeon…who recommended increased bodily exertion before my ordinary daily labours began, and thought rowing and excellent plan. I had the command of a good, heavy, safe boat, lived near the river, and adopted it for a couple of hours early in the morning. It is true I gained muscular vigor, but with it a prodigious appetite, which I was compelled to indulge, and consequently increased my weight, until my kind old friend advised me to forsake the exercise.
As you can see, Banting had about the same results with his exercise program that people do today with theirs.
He was told to eat ‘light food’ and in moderation, but to no avail.
I have spared no pains to remedy this by low living (moderation and light food as generally prescribed, but I had no direct bill of fare to know what was really intended), and that, consequently, brought the system into a low impoverished state, without decreasing corpulence, caused many obnoxious boils to appear, and two rather formidable carbuncles, for which I was ably operated upon and fed into the increased obesity.
When he finally fell into the hands of someone who had good sense, he got the following advice:
The items from which I was advised to abstain as much as possible were:–Bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer, and potatoes, which had been the main (and, I thought innocent) elements of my existance, or at all events they had for many years been adopted freely.
These, said my excellent adviser, contain starch and saccharine matter, tending to create fat, and should be avoided altogether.
Take a look at pages 18-19 in the book to see the actual diet Banting ended up following. Note how much booze he drank along with his low-carb fare. Had he only drunk half this much, he would have no doubt lost half again as much weight.
Here’s what he was eating before. Is it any wonder he was corpulent?
My former dietary table was bread and milk for breakfast, or a pint of tea with plenty of milk and sugar, and buttered toast; meat, beer, much of bread (or which I was always very fond) and pastry for dinner, the meal of tea similar to that of breakfast, and generally a fruit tart of bread and milk for supper. I had little comfort and far less sound sleep.
How many people – maybe even you yourself – find themselves saying something along these lines after they discover the beauty of the low-carb diet.
I can conscientiously assert I never lived so well as under the new plan of dietary, which I should have formerly thought a dangerous extravagant trespass against health.
Here Banting is 150 years ahead of his time.
The simple dietary evidently adds fuel to the fire, whereas the superior and liberal seems to extinguish it.
In other words, low-cal, low-fat diets add fuel to the obesity fire while higher-calorie, higher-fat diets do the opposite. We know why now.
Mr. Banting even fiddles with a maintenance plan in much the same way that I follow my own maintenance plan and recommend patients follow theirs.
I…have frequently indulged my fancy, experimentally, in using milk, sugar, butter, and potatoes–indeed, I may say all the forbidden articles except beer, in moderation, with impunity, but always as an exception, not as a rule. This deviation, however, convinces me that I hold the power of maintaining the happy medium in my own hands.
And, like all of us, he has seen people successful on the diet get sabotages by their friends and family.
Many…doubtless return to their former habits, encouraged so to act by the ill-judged advice of friends who, I am persuaded (from the correspondence I have had on this most interesting subject) become unthinking accomplices in the destruction of those whom they regard and esteem.
You’re on what?!?!?! One of those dangerous high-protein diets? You’ll damage your kidneys; you’ll have a heart attack; etc. I wonder what they said back then?
Finally, Banting was really prescient when he used the term ‘parasite’ to describe the fat accumulating on his body.
The word “parasite” has been much commented upon, as inappropriate to any but a living creeping thing (of course I use the word in a figurative sense, as a burden to the flesh), but if fat is not an insidious creeping enemy, I do not know what it is.
He used the term ‘parasite’ figuratively, but fat actually does invade the viscera. And stimulates the innate immune system to attack it just as a parasite would. Macrophages swarm over and between the fat cells just like they would if this visceral fat were a parasite or other foreign invader. In fact, having a lot of visceral fat is not much different than having a big splinter deep in the middle of your belly. It catalyzes the same immune response. Banting hit the nail on the head when he called fat a parasite way back in 1862 (the date of first publication).
Spend your 15-30 minutes reading this little book, and you’ll realize just how little things have changed in 150 years. Enjoy.
Hi Dr. Mike,
Love your books, blogs and website. All this has saved me
from the evils of hypoglycemia and gluten intolerance. Reading
the postings and comments have been an inspiration more than you know.
Two or three thoughts:
“Sweet” butter means that it is not “salted ” butter. Most groceries still sell both types. I don’t think this is new – my grandmother, who was born in the 19th century, used both terms freely.
The discussions about the relationship between exercise and
weight loss reminded me of farm people, who in my youth were
seldom chubby, in spite of hefty meals that included meat,
vegetables, potatoes, homemade bread, etc. Why was that?
Then I remembered that in those days, the people had more
consistent activity all day (not as many machines to help
out), three meals and NO eating between meals. Dessert was
a Sunday treat most of the time. In effect, daily mini-fasts with
heavy all-day-long activity. No wonder most rural people
were fairly slim/muscular for much of their life. It looks to me
like day-long activity helps use up both calories and insulin-induced flab. An hour or two at the gym every day coupled with a sit-down job does NOT help with weight loss; just ask my dis-
appointed boyfriend.
Another factor may contribute to people clinging to the
lo-fat/hi-carb eating. Addiction. Sugar addiction is no different from any other substance abuse. And it is just as hard to kick
because sugars of all types lurk in the strangest places. (You discussed this in PPLP) When I talk lo-carb to overweight friends, I know pretty quickly when I’m talking to a junkie and that he/she alone knows how miserable he/she has to get before trying a change. I include myself in this – I was obsessed with candy bars and ice cream by the time I was nine. I got into big trouble whenever my mother caught me, but regrettably I continued the error of my ways whenever I could. It took decades to straighten out (mostly) fully. And like you, I wonder if I would have more carb lee-way today if I had behaved better
when I was a kid.
Hi Bev–
A sugar/carb addiction in a kid is a dangerous thing. I know because I was a sugar/carb junkie as a kid. And skinny. That’s the problem. Many kids are thin and have, of course, the feeling of invincibility common to most teenagers. As a consequence they eat and drink a lot of junk that they shouldn’t, damaging their pancreatic cells as they go, setting themselves up for real problems in their adult years.
Of course now many kids and teenagers are already obese and experiencing the damage.
Thanks for writing.
MRE
Regarding “sweet butter”, another commenter got it right; it is made with fresh cream that has not yet naturally cultured. Back in Banning’s days they weren’t pasteurizing dairy yet and the industrial dairying was just getting started with the urban distillary dairies, so most dairy was still local, grass-fed, and very wholesome.
Interestingly, there are stories of people with various serious ailments, including diabetes and esophogeal injuries, that consumed only fresh raw milk and lived very long healthy lives. Even the famed Mayo Clinic started as a TB sanitarium with a raw milk therapy. No one would suggest that anyone live on milk or dairy alone now, but that is because conventional milk is no longer a whole food product with all its original nutritients (highly processed and fractionated) nor are most dairy herds fed their natural diet – pasture.
Cultured butter (it often is the unsalted variety today in stores has a more complex flavour because the natural (& beneficial) bacteria has changed the lactose to lactic acid. Years ago when people might have skimmed a bit of cream each day and saved it up to make butter when a quantity accumulated, it would have continued to culture. The liquid remaining from butter making is what older people remember as real buttermilk. What passes for buttermilk today is skimmed milk that has a culture added to it, which is entirely different in taste and thickness.
Our family consumes certified raw dairy, including raw butter (I buy it in a tub, already churned. I keep it in the freezer and remove a few day’s worth at a time to store at room temp. It continues to “culture” at room temp and can get a bit strong smelling, some might say funky (which admittedly took some getting used to) esecially in the summer, but it is very safe to consume and is luscious on some fresh hot green beans.
I highly recommend Ron Schmid’s informative and interesting book, The Untold Story of Milk, which has a lot of great referenced info on dairy, past and present. It’s eye-opening.
Back to making my cottage cheese and chevre…
Anna
Thanks Anna for your usual insightful comment.
Cheers–
MRE
Thanks so much for taking the time to scan all those pages.I am reminded of the many joyful hours I spent combing through university libraries and used bookstores looking for just such pearls of Victorian and Regency prose on just such paper.
At that time paper was made entirely from rag. The later you go in the nineteenth century, the books are browner and more brittle, disintegrating easily because they started adding wood pulp to the mixture which raised the acid content. It’s a big problem for libraries how to preserve these disintegrating wood pulp books. I guess carbohydrates are just as bad for paper as they are for us.
All the best,
Chuck Berezin
Hi Chuck–
Thanks for the info on 19th century paper. I was unaware of any of it.
Cheers–
MRE
Thanks for your comment. I might add but “how they talk!”
Mike,
Sadly even today this man would be laughed at and scorned. I am even sadder when I say that this would occur on many low carb discussion boards.
He is giving personal testimony of his success and well being on this diet.
But a lot of of people would mock him for not providing science, and going against the government. Even in low carb circles.
Society may have changed, but human behaviour seems to be the same.
Hi Dave–
Of course he would be scorned. And he didn’t have the science – he just knew the diet worked. In fact, there wasn’t much science to be had at that time, so he was doing the best he could.
Cheers–
MRE
Sir Bantings physician was Jewish by birth, rearing yet not practise and perhaps this might explain the injunction about pork ?
He didn’t ‘dig on swine, baby’
And how do you know that William Harvey was Jewish by birth. If so, that would account for the no-swine admonition. But is it really true?
Cheers–
MRE
A propos 19th century paper you should look into the history of hemp, a similar scam of gigantic proportion. Paper was made of hemp, cotton (euro notes are still made out of cotton) or linen until the “invention” of wood pulp paper that needed a lot of chemicals to be produced (sulfuric acid to soften the fibre, chlorine for bleaching etc.). Then look who lobbied to tax hemp out of existence and invented even the marihuana propaganda: Hearst, DuPont and other industrials.
You can read on this at
http://www.jackherer.com/
It might be a bit exagerated on the virtues of (indutrial) hemp, but it is a real eye opener (on the scale of the lie we live in).
Hi gallier2–
Good to hear from you; it’s been a while.
I didn’t realize when I made this post that I was going to get such an education on the history of paper making.
Thanks for the link.
Cheers–
MRE
Slightly O/T, but related. One of the things I noticed about his diet is dry toast, and a few other carby items. The reason I mention this is a conversation I had recently with a couple of grad students. (one of the benefits of living near several universities is you often get waited on by chatty grad students.) They mentioned a threshold for carb intake and bio- marker improvement that was part of study they were helping with. Apparently they were finding a very narrow range of 130-150g/carb/day beyond which “most” people showed no further bio-marker improvement by continuing to lower their carb intake. But that at more than 200g/carb/day many folks results got worse quickly. I just thought it was interesting.
Interesting, yes, but accurate no. The medical literature is full of studies of people who have improved all kinds of biomarkers by reducing carbs below the 130-150 gram threshold.
Cheers–
MRE
Dr. Mike:
You and Dave above talk about Banting being scorned without having scientific back-up.
I’ve started rereading Protein Power where you state that in 1996 Dr. Mary Dan and yourself went to a conference where it was admitted by researchers and doctors that low fat diets didn’t work, etc., etc. and where you also quoted that statistically in the US fat consumption in the 70′s and 80′s decreased by 25% and yet all the so-called diseases that were blamed on fat consumption were sky-rocketing, only proves the point that hear-say, anecdotal, or genuine statistical data is of no consequence to those who minds are encased in “bozone.”
I don’t know how Dr. Mary Dan and yourself, being in that field, have the patience to have to deal with the opposition, and I understand your frustration when you write articles like the one you did on Jane Brody. Not only is it enlightening to us readers, but very therapeutic for you in turn.
I don’t know if it was enlightening to readers, but I can assure you it was therapeutic for me.
Cheers–
MRE
Cos my great great Granfather was Dr Christopher Peacock something of an amateur medical historian, who also went to Kings Canterbury where i recall Harvey went.
Are you sure you’re not confusing your William Harvey’s? There was a famous William Harvey and the William Harvey who treated Banting. The two were not the same.
grandfather i meant
Yessum they were not one and the same
Thank you Dr Eades! What a joy it is to read this letter. Apart from the actual very interesting content and merit, the language is simply magnificent. Now my head is filled with quotes waiting to be unleashed on my friends, who, when that happens, will presumably simply reply with: “oh, how quaint”.
That’s why I wanted to scan and post the book. There is something about reading that language on those yellowed pages that makes it all that much better.
Cheers–
MRE
Like Bart, I love the language of that time. I have a cookery book from that period (Modern Cookery for Private Families by Eliza Acton), and find it captivating just to read – though I do cook from it, too (excellent steak pudding). Sadly, I don’t have an original copy, just the modern facsimile reprint, but it’s still worth reading.
Thanks for the reminder about Banting. I’d read his book when I did my initial raft looking into low carb, but hadn’t thought of him for a while.
Glad you enjoyed it.
What’s most amazing is Banting simply thought through this introspective journey by using some good old fashioned common sense and then applied it. Whereas the so-called “experts” of the day insisted on sticking with the insanity of recommending less and less calories while people got fatter and fatter.
Yep, sounds a WHOLE LOT like 2007 to me, Dr. Mike! THANK YOU for sharing Banting’s writings because it arms us low-carbers with documentation that low-carb works and has been for well over a century!
It’s worked a lot longer than that if you believe the Paleolithic and paleopathology data.
Cheers–
MRE