Fad diets never fade away

Everything from banting to 'chew-chew' diets have hit celebrity status.

By Michael Stroh ~ The Baltimore Sun

Before the Atkins New Diet Revolution, before The Zone, before the Pritkin Program, there was the Letter on Corpulence.

Its author was William Banting, a 5-foot-5 former London undertaker who at 200 pounds was too tubby to tie his own shoes. But after stripping sugar and starch from his diet -- and finding he shed 50 pounds as a result -- Banting did what many men with a fat-to-fit plan have subsequently done: He penned a diet book.

Published in 1864, "Letter on Corpulence, Address to the Public" advocated lean meat, vegetables, dry toast and soft-boiled eggs -- topped off with a toddy for good measure. Considered the granddaddy of low-carbohydrates diets, the book went on to sell more than 100,000 copies, becoming so influential on both sides of the Atlantic that adherents boasted not of dieting but of "banting" their pounds away.

It may have been the first recorded diet craze but certainly not the last. Despite a century of progress in unraveling the scientific mysteries of food and its effects on the body, the question of what to eat is far from settled. If history is any guide, dueling diets and scientific squabbles will continue for years to come.

"Many aspects of our current response to food were foreshadowed 100 years ago," writes Michelle Stacy in "Consumed: Why Americans love, hate, and fear food." "We've traveled this road before." For centuries, humans were blissfully ignorant of the nutritional content of their food. A hunk of bread or tallowy beef was considered roughly interchangeable. Dietary advice usually centered on how much and not what to eat. In 1860, the Ladies Home Magazine, for example, recommended meal portions ranging from 20 ounces for women to 36 ounces for prizefighters.

Then Wilbur Olin Atwater came along.

Long before Weight Watchers, the Connecticut chemist as Wesleyan University preached the virtues of counting calories, and cataloged the nutrient composition of foods in the 1890s. A few decades earlier, in the 1840s, German chemist Justus von Leibig reported that food was made of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals and other substances.

But Atwater's influence extended beyond the lab. He made public recommendations based on what he knew -- or thought he knew about diet and nutrition.

Many of our current attitudes about diet and nutrition were forged in this era.

Then there was Horace Fletcher, a man known as the "Great Masticator" or the "chew-chew man," for his single-minded devotion to the single-minded act of chewing.

Fletcher had been a wealthy, 217-pound businessman who, at 40, couldn't persuade any life insurance companies to sell him a policy. His response was a diet, described in his book "The AB-Z of Our Nutrition," written in 1903, in which Fletcher took chewing to a new level.

He advocated chewing food to liquid -- recommending at least 100 chews for each morsel of food. Soup and other liquids should be swished in the mouth for 30 seconds before swallowing. All that time chewing meant less food intake, which helped accelerate weight loss. Fletcher lost 65 pounds.

Diets are subject to fashion. Until recent weeks, the "in" diets called for low intake of fats and high intake of carbohydrates, the recipe that government nutritionists and many scientists insist helps shed weight and prevent heart disease. Now there are claims that the healthiest diet includes more fat and fewer carbohydrates. But which will become the fletcherism of our time?

"When you look back in history," says Harvey A. Levenstein, a historian, "you see things proclaimed as universal truths that turned out to be not so universal."