Diets Low Carb

The low carb diet plan has been the diet news story of the last decade. But believe it or not, it didn't start with Dr. Atkins low carb diet (for the general public) or with Dr. Di Pasquale's Anabolic or Metabolic Diets (geared towards maximizing body composition). It actually started with a London undertaker more than 140 years ago. 

It started with a 66-year old undertaker in 1862. Weighing 202 pounds at 5'5", William Banting was so overweight that he couldn't tie his own shoelaces. That year, experiencing, among other problems, hearing difficulties, Banting went to an ear, nose and throat surgeon named Dr. William Harvey, who promptly decided that Banting's problem wasn't deafness, it was obesity. His fat was pressing on his inner ear. 

Dr. Harvey's Low carb diet food prescription: no more starch and sugar, no beer and potatoes. Only meat, fish, vegetables and wine (well... crust of toast every now and then). 

Harvey's Low Carb Diet Recipe For Each Meal Included: 

The diet worked and his problems, including the hearing difficulties, disappeared. Inspired, he published the first low-carb diet book in 1963, Letter on Corpulence. 

Enter The Low Carb Low Calorie Diet

The next stage in the low-carb story was set between 1890 and 1900 with a neat concept called the calorie. An agricultural chemist named Wilbur Atwater got the bright idea that if you stuck some food in a little mini-oven -called a calorimeter- and burned it to ash, you could measure the amount of heat it produced. He called the unit of measurement a calorie. 

The idea is simply: the body is like that mini-oven, it "burns" calories, and if you eat more than you can burn, you gain weight, if you burn more than you can eat, the opposite happens, you lose weight. 

However, Banting made an important observation. That weight gain or loss is more than that. For one, he noted that what he ate made more of a difference to his fat cells than how much he ate. This is exactly Metabolic Diet's central philosophy a century hence - that although calories are important, the kind of calories you eat determine your hormonal response to food, which in turn determines a great deal about your tendency to store or release fat. 

The Pro and Cons of Low Carb Diet

The period: right after the World War II, the place: the medical department of E.I. DuPont, the problem: the growing obesity problem among the staff. 

DuPont hired Dr. Alfred Pennington to find out why the traditional low-calorie diets were not working. Again, it comes down to Mr. Banting's nice little observation - Obesity, Pennington decided, was due not to overeating but instead to the body's inability to use carbohydrates for anything other than making fat. 

Pennington put the DuPont executives on a high-fat, high-protein, low-carb diet unrestricted-calorie diet. His dieters reported that they felt well, enjoyed their meals and were never hungry between meals. And the 20 obese individuals that he treated lost an average of 22 pounds each, in an average time of three-and-a-half months. 

In the 1940s, Dr. Alfred Pennington studied health and eating habits of employees at E.I. duPont de Nemours and Co., Wilmington, Delaware. By 1951, he came up with the diet that really worked and this was really similar to the diet discovered by William Banting almost a century ago. >From this he came out with his theory. 

The gist of Dr. Pennington's theory was that people get fat not because of eating too much but because of what their bodies do with food - turning too much of whatever they eat into fat. Low-calorie diet was not working because it wouldn't get rid of the fat, because overweight people don't fully break down carbohydrates and most of them is converted to fat. 

His solution is partly based on the findings of experiments at Russel Sage Institute in 1928: each meal should consist of 2-to-3 ounces of fat and 6-to-9 ounces of meat. Pennington diet became popularly known as the duPont Diet, and was published by Holiday Magazine in June 1 950 and subsequently offered in 10-cent booklet form. 

Fat Was Out Low Fat Low Carb Diet Was In

In the 1950s and '60s a scientist named Ancel Keys had begun studying heart disease and diet and had concluded that cholesterol was a cause of heart disease, saturated fat causes a rise in cholesterol and therefore, saturated fat causes heart disease. 

Keys' Seven Countries study became the basis for dietary policy for more than three decades, indirectly birthed the fat phobia of the '80s and directly spawned an entire bureaucracy devoted to lowering cholesterol (i.e., the National Cholesterol Education Program) and to producing some of the most profitable pharmaceutical drugs in history. 

The Low-Carb Diet Revolution

While the previous studies were right on target on the role of metabolism in weight gains and obesity, in the 1990s a number of weight loss proponents had started to focus on insulin and metabolism as critical determinants in obesity. 

Among them were Dr. Robert Atkins with his New Diet Revolution in 1992, Barry Sears' Into The Zone in 1995 and Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades with Protein Power in 1995. 

These views gained further support when Dr. Walter Willett - chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard University's School of Public Health and one of the most respected mainstream researchers in the country - suggested a re-thinking and re-drafting of the 1992 USDA Food Pyramid, which for a decade had promoted six to 11 servings a day of grains, breads and pastas. 

In essence, insulin plays a big role mainly because excessive consumption of processed/refined carbohydrates and sugar had made the body resistant to it. Eating a lot of carbohydrates results in rapid rise in blood glucose level which triggers the body to release more insulin. 

As insulin floods the body, it results in sudden drop in blood sugar level which triggers feelings of hunger, thus prompting consumption of more carbohydrates and sugar. With repeating fluctuations in blood sugar levels, the body sooner or later would have difficulty responding to insulin. 

Metabolic Diet

In early 1995, Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale published The Anabolic Diet, an earlier version of Metabolic Diet. The Metabolic Diet encompasses all the various diets that are carbohydrate conscious including those that are champions of low dietary carbohydrate intake such as the Anabolic Diet, Atkins' Low Carb Diet Plan, Protein Power, the pediatric ketogenic diet, and Barry Sears' Zone diet; and those that follow the more conventional high complex carbohydrate, lower fat approach. 

Dr. Di Pasquale developed the diet partly as a result of competing in the sport of powerlifting and from his 30 years experience running a Bariatric clinic, a clinic for those severely overweight. 

The Anabolic and Metabolic Diet, while introduced to the general public in general and to bodybuilders specifically, in 1995 when he wrote the Anabolic Diet, were developed over three decades. He began discovering on his own the value of a low carb, higher fat, high protein diet as a young pre-med student in the mid 1960s. 

In the late 60s he began cycling the low carb protein diet, alternating short periods of high carbs with the longer periods of low carbs. He used this phase shift type of diet to maximize his strength and muscle mass in the 1970s and 80s, and to win the IPF World Championships in 1976 and gold at the World Games in 1981. **

F150 Accessory Ford Trucks Jotto Mounts Ladder Rack Hitch Step