"Is there anyone who isn't on Atkins?" a colleague asked me the other day. It was an understandable question: the philosphy of the low-carb diet - promoted by the late Dr Robert C Atkins (he died earlier this year from a head injury) - is bandied about everywhere. The bestseller lists don't seem to have enough room for the Atkins plan and its many imitators. Fast food restaurants now offer "the protein option", which in one case involves a jumbo hamburger wrapped between two huge lettuce leaves. Celebrities who once espoused the peaceful, natural ways of vegetarianism now unapologetically shill for the meaty Atkins way. Healthfood stores that touted wholegrains and soya now devote entire aisles to Atkins's carb-replacement products.
And no wonder: we're fatter than we've ever been. Obesity is on the rise worldwide - the UK is beaten only by the US. The medical consequences of such fat, ranging from diabetes to stroke to heart disease to arthritis, are all skyrocketing, threatening to bankrupt healthcare systems and put a major crimp in our retirement plans. And then there's the really bad news: we can't fit into our Calvins any more.
Atkins is popular because it promises liberation from all this in a painless, scientific way: we can eat as much meat and fat and cheese and eggs, with a few vegetables, as we want and still lose weight. What's more, "the plan", as its devotees call it, will change our body chemistry and make it easy to keep the pounds off. As Atkins writes, "I have something designed to increase your enthusiasm to a fever pitch. Are you ready for this?... This diet will give you an edge, what in scientific lingo would be called a metabolic advantage. That's what will enable you to lose weight on the Atkins diet eating the same number of calories you used to gain on." You can see the attraction.
And yet Atkins's plan is really nothing but a late 20th-century American refinement of a system first popularised by a mid-19th century Victorian, a man named William Banting. Atkins may not have copied him directly, but he was certainly aware of the precedent. Indeed, the broad outlines of the Banting story have been in the public domain for some time now: man gets fat, tries many diets and fads, finds doctor who prescribes no-sugar diet, loses weight, writes pamphlet and claims fame.
Even in such broad arcs, we find remarkable parallels to our own time. Fat to fame - how many modern diet gurus have used that story to enormous effect, not to mention wealth? This is the true legacy of William Banting, and in the little-known details lie the lesson the Victorians discovered: if you want to dine at the table of empire, you've got to watch what you eat.
London, 1862: William Banting was fat - nearly 202lb (14 and a half stone) to be exact; not exactly a bella figura in anyone's mind, particularly if you are only 5ft 5in. Banting was fat for the same reason so many of his prosperous peers were fat and, for that matter, for the same reason so many of us are fat today: he ate loads of sweet and fatty foods - because they were there to be eaten. Londoners of his day gorged on the treats of empire, just as Americans and, increasingly, Britons do today.
A good-humoured man with a distinctive chin-beard and puckish sense of humour (he once joked of his eating habits that "big ships are not built with scanty materials"), Banting hailed from a line of royal undertakers dating back to the mid-18th century. The family handled the funerals of everyone from Prince Albert to the Iron Duke, and historians of the period credit William Banting with devising the first modern public funerals for royals. Albert's funeral was the Princess Diana memorial of its day; Wellington's was such a spectacle of black bunting that its design is still consulted by royal undertakers. By the time Banting retired from the position in late 1862, he had reason to be proud of his career and his many contributions to God and country.
There is plentiful evidence, however, that he was hardly of good cheer. The early days of his retirement were grim. His wife was ill and so, increasingly, was he. More than anything, Banting was depressed about his weight: "If fat is not an insidious creeping enemy," he wrote, "I do not know what is."
The sad, fat Victorian - hardly the stuff of myth. Yet a close reading of the period shows that Banting was not alone. The notion that Victorians were happy being fat, that it was a "sign of prosperity", wilts when one considers mid-century depictions of wealthy Victorian fatties. The character Joseph Sedley in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, for example, was consistently portrayed as having been effeminised by his fat ("he was as vain as a girl"). Social commentators of the time essayed loudly on the same theme, with one, the surgeon-major Joshua Duke, blaming obesity for "effeminacy, unmanliness and perhaps unwomanliness".
Although he described himself as a tough-skinned man, Banting nevertheless felt the sting of such anti-fatism. "No man labouring under obesity can be quite insensible to the sneers and remarks of the cruel and injudicious in public assemblies, public vehicles, or the ordinary street traffic," he lamented, "and therefore he naturally keeps away as much as possible from places where he is likely to be made the object of taunts and remarks."
There was also a growing awareness that being fat could make you sick. Just before Banting retired, the popular journal Cornhill published a series of articles detailing the "ills of corpulence". In 1859, the Lancet published the first known English language medical reference to a case of childhood obesity. Dickens's Pickwick Papers depicted obesity as the cause of daytime somnolence, personified by "Joe, the fat boy". The first weight-for-height charts began appearing in popular journals in the late 1850s. Far from being fat and happy, the typical middle- to upper-class Victorian was more likely fat and tormented. Sound familiar?
Banting tried everything to extricate himself from "the evil", as he liked to call his bulk. "I have tried sea air and bathing in various localities, with much walking exercise," he wrote. "I have taken gallons of physic and liquor potasse; 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 day, so to speak, and earned it, if bodily labour may be so construed; and have spared no trouble or expense in consultations with the best authorities in the land, giving each and all a fair time for an experiment, without any permanent remedy, as still the evil gradually increased."
The medical establishment of Banting's day was about as prepared as our own when it came to dealing with obesity. "Indeed," Banting marvelled, "one of the ablest authorities as a physician in the land told me he had gained one pound in weight every year he attained manhood, and was not surprised at my condition, but advised more bodily exercise - vapour baths, and shampooing." Over a course of months Banting took a total of 90 Turkish baths. He could barely hide his contempt.
Nor could he hide his increasing infirmity. By August 1862, he was so fat that he could not stoop to tie his own shoes, "nor to attend to the little offices humanity requires without considerable pain and difficulty". He had to go down his staircase backwards to relieve the jar of excess weight on his knee joints. He suffered an umbilical rupture and resorted to wearing a bulky truss. By late August he despaired: his vision and hearing were going. He consulted an "eminent surgeon" who "made light of my case".
Then he happened upon a strange little man named William Harvey. Harvey was a well-known ear surgeon who ran the Royal Dispensary for Diseases of the Ear from his small office at 2 Soho Square. A liberal social activist and a friend of Dickens (with whom he co-founded the Great Northern Hospital for indigents), he was a cheerful, God-fearing man who went through much of his professional career under the shadow of another William Harvey, the 17th-century author of The Circulation Of The Blood. "Any relation?" he was often asked, as if he might be able to channel some ancestral wisdom. (He wasn't, and couldn't.)
But Harvey was an adventurer of his own sort, and from early in his career he had made it a habit, like many young physicians of the era, to sojourn in Paris, then the centre of experimental medicine. One evening some time in 1856, while out for a walk, he came across an announcement for a lecture at the Paris School of Medicine by a Dr Claude Bernard. A failed playwright who went on to become one of the leading lights of 19th-century medicine, Bernard was also a vivisectionist - he believed the only way to understand human illness was through the direct observation of bodily processes. Such beliefs made him so controversial and unpopular that his own wife divorced him for his practices. Yet it is for a chance discovery made from a dissected dog that Bernard is best known.
For years Bernard was obsessed with exactly how the liver functioned and to find the answer he performed a number of experiments on dogs. One night, late in his laboratory, Bernard removed the liver of one dog and "washed it out". He then clamped both ends of the veins leading in and out of the organ to prevent any contamination. According to his own written account, Bernard was suddenly called away and forgot to return to the lab to remove the clamps.
The next morning he measured the glucose levels and found, to his surprise, that the liver had generated quantities of its own glycogen, a starchy-fatty substance that he deduced was sugar in its stored form. From this chance observation, replicated many times, Bernard deduced that the liver makes glucose and stores it as glycogen, the primary fuel of the human body. From this discovery proceeds almost all modern hepatic science, not to mention the theoretical underpinning of Atkinsism: if the liver makes its own sugar, you don't have to consume any.
Listening to Bernard, Harvey had his own epiphany. "It had long been well-known that a purely animal diet greatly assisted in checking the secretion of diabetic urine," he reasoned, "and it seemed to follow, as a matter of course, that the total abstinence from saccharine and farinaceous matter must drain the liver of this excess amount of glucose, and thus arrest in a similar proportion the diabetic tendency. Reflecting on this chain of argument, and knowing too that a saccharine and farinaceous diet is used to fatten certain animals, and that in diabetes the whole of the fat of the body rapidly disappears, it occurred to me that excessive obesity might be allied to diabetes as to its cause, and that if a purely animal diet was useful in the latter disease, a combination of animal food with such vegetable matters as contained neither sugar nor starch, might serve to arrest this undue formation of fat."
It was the first time that the experimental method had been used to deduce a human dietary regimen. It would change William Banting's life.
January 1863: Banting was fatter than ever. Now a retired widower, he battled "the evil" full time, rowing the river Thames, riding on horseback, all the while struggling with his worsening knee pains and hearing loss. The truss was an agony of its own. Then one day, while calling on one of his physicians, he was informed that his doctor was on holiday and was directing all calls to a "certain Mr Harvey". Banting had nothing to lose.
Almost immediately Harvey saw the extent of Banting's problems. "You're too fat," he said, "and the fat has obstructed one of your auditory canals. You've got to lose the weight." Banting explained that Harvey was not the first person to suggest such a notion. But Harvey had a novel plan. He described how he once had a horse that had a big belly. He'd even identified the condition as "big-bellied horse disease". But it wasn't. The horse was just eating the wrong kind of food - grains that had too much sugar and starch rather than hay. Banting, he said, should think of himself as a horse, or a cow.
The doctor then laid out the basic no-nos: bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes. Banting protested that these "had been the main (and, I thought, innocent) elements of my existence... for many years". Harvey pushed him to think it through for himself.
I have often wondered what Banting, his knees aching, the truss pinching as his coach bumped over the cobblestones back to his home and the dread staircase, was thinking that evening. Was he despondent? Hopeful? Angry that this doctor had just prescribed a wacky diet? What he thought is not recorded. But we do know what he did. He concocted a new daily routine. As he put it:
"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 little 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 ounces of good claret, sherry, or Maderia [sic] - champagne, port and beer 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, and a glass or two of claret.
"For nightcap, if required, a tumbler of grog - (gin, whisky, or brandy, without sugar) - or a glass or two of claret or sherry."
Quantity was not important, Banting decided, "[as long as] the nature of the food is strictly adhered to".
To make a long story brief, the pounds began melting off. In less than a year he lost 46lb. He could come down the stairs naturally. The truss came off. His sight and hearing improved. He could "perform every necessary office for himself". In short, he proclaimed, he was on "a tram-way of happiness".
To spread the gospel, he published a short pamphlet, which he dubbed A Letter On Corpulence. It went through six editions in two years, selling 50,000 copies. By 1866, London, and much of Europe, was in full Banting-mania. Like the Atkins diet today, it first appealed to the upper classes. The would-be king of France, the obese Comte de Chambord, thinking that he might some day be restored to the throne and thus need to mount a white stallion to parade into Paris, used the diet to get down to riding weight. German and French gentry took to it as well, along with affluent types in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, where the book was republished.
Banting's regimen then trickled down to the middle classes. This it did for the same reason that the Atkins diet rages today: meat was relatively cheap, empire had broadened food diversity and stimulated consumerism in general, and health and fitness were becoming a religion in themselves. Then and now, the diet conjured a kind of imperial paradox: it was enabled by the appetite of empire, the ability to afford lots of meats - the same appetite that gave rise to "the evil" in the first place.
Banting's greatest detractors were, as Atkins's are today, the medical establishment, which speculated that the system was dangerous and even circulated a rumour that Banting had died from his diet. (His response in the Times was a model of restraint.) The editors of Blackwood's magazine took a tack similar to that of many of today's obesity-deniers: Banting simply wasn't that fat. "Mr Banting seems to labour under the hallucination that he was at least as heavy as Falstaff," they wrote. "We, on the contrary, have a shrewd suspicion that Hamlet would have beaten him in the scales."
But, like today, most people simply did not care what the professionals thought - the Banting system worked. By the 1870s "to bant" became synonymous with "to diet", eventually winning a place in the esteemed Merck Manual of medical information. The magazine Charivari, forerunner to Punch, regularly ran cartoons about the diet. A popular song made the rounds:
Some time ago where e'er I strayed
I heard the observation made,
To which I close attention paid,
'How very stout you're getting.'
Said one, 'Dear me, you waddle quite,
You bid fair to become a fright.'
Another said, 'You're such a sight,
You're like a bladder blown out tight.
And only see where e'er you go
How you're compelled to puff and blow.
You surely soon will bust your clo'.
If you don't follow Banting,
You won't much longer get about,
If you continue thus so stout,
You'll fall a victim to the gout,
You really must try Banting.'
And, then as now, if one really studied the diet itself, one could clearly see that, special medical insights about the liver notwithstanding, the diet was also... light on calories. Yet there was something about Bantingism and its adherents that was different from their 21st-century counterparts in the Atkins camp: the notion of self-denial, that there should be a price for every indulgence. After a few years on his regimen, which even from the start had room for a bit of non-Atkins toast, Banting himself grew philosophical about it. "I should not hesitate to partake of a fattening dietary occasionally," he wrote. "But I shall always observe a careful watch upon myself to discover the effect, and act accordingly, so that, if I choose to spend a day or two with Dives, so to speak, I must not forget to devote the next to Lazarus."
Scan the entire library of Atkins and his copycats, and you will look in frustration for those kind of sentiments. Self-restraint is simply not something the modern diet industry is willing to discuss, perhaps because it is so difficult for most of us to achieve, perhaps because it does not sell, or perhaps because it simply has no place in a world in which consumption remains the principal activity of the day. Where does a day with Lazarus fit in the modern global consumer orgy?
One other difference: when Banting sold an amazing 50,000 copies, he felt so embarrassed at the thought of having made money from others' grief that he donated all the proceeds to a series of charities for the poor, then published a full accounting in the last edition. Where does Atkins's money go? According to his foundation, it goes back into funding medical research with "emphasis given to organisations advancing controlled carbohydrate nutritional protocols". In other words, it goes back into funding Atkinsism.
A few years ago, I visited Banting's grave in west London. The visit was prompted by the Reverend David Banting, the great-great-grandnephew of "Fat William", as he is known in the family. David is vicar of St Peter's in Harold Wood, Essex. I had got in touch with him after placing an advertisement in a literary supplement seeking information for a biography I am writing on his ancestor. A slender, ruddy-faced, soccer-playing fellow of rather conservative bent, David had lunch with me just up the street from where Fat William's house once perched on St James's Place, before we set out to find his ancestor.
Then it began to rain. I wanted to go home and do it another day, but not David. And so for the next two hours we had plodded around Brompton cemetery, first cajoling the caretaker to unlock its musty old archives, then dusting off a series of 150-year-old tomes and, finally, finding the right reference. The rain just got worse and worse.
At last, there it was: the Banting family grave. Tall and rather modest in design, it was laid out in a style typical of the period: the first to die was buried deepest, followed by the next, then the next, and so on. On the bottom was Banting's wife; she had died only months before William had lost his weight and had never seen him at the height of his fame. I had known about that through documents from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. But there was a surprise: the next to go was Emily, William's oldest daughter, who died in 1864. Banting himself did not die until 1878, when he was a ripe old 81.
"I had no idea he had outlived one of his children," said David.
The Atkins of his day had lived longer than the Atkins of our own, who died at the age of 72.
Banting lived a long, full life after losing his weight. One key, he believed, was that he kept it off. Constant vigilance was simply the price of health in a world of plenty. He died of bronchitis. Harvey did not fare as well, dying of a tumour on his thigh in 1872. Although he eventually published a book of his own about diet, he never quite achieved the stature that his work - both on weight loss and ear surgery - deserved. I'll right that some day, if one of his ancestors rings me up.
Meanwhile, practitioners of Atkins might keep in mind two salient facts. One, that the Comte de Chambord died from practising too extreme a form of Bantingism; and, two, that William Banting himself remained convinced that his system was the best money couldn't buy. As he put it in a letter to an admirer in the United States in 1870, "It matters very little and certainly nothing to me what ridicule or abuse is bestowed upon the system, for the great and simple fact remains uncontroverted that I am beyond suspicion - and simply highly pleased that I have aided in waking up Medical Men and others to a proper state of reflection."
· Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became The Fattest People In The World, published by Allen Lane priced £9.99.