Living Low Carb by Jonny Bowden Read Free Book Online Page B

written by Dr. Franklin Bicknell:
The cure of obesity… can be, of course, achieved by simple starvation, but as Dr. Mackarness explains, this is both an illogical and an injurious treatment, while [a treatment] based on eating as much of everything one likes except starches and sugars and foods rich in these, is both logical and actively good for one’s health, quite apart from the effect on one’s weight. The sugars and starches of our diet form the least valuable part and contribute nothing which cannot better be gained from fat and protein foods like meat and fish, eggs and cheese, supplemented by green vegetables and some fruit. Such a diet provides an abundance… of vitamins, trace elements, and essential amino acids—an abundance of all those subtle, yet essential, nutrients which are often lacking in diets based largely on the fat-forming carbohydrates.
    A little context: ever since 1829, when William Wadd, Surgeon-Extraordinary to the Prince Regent, proclaimed that the cause of obesity was “an over-indulgence at the table” (i.e., eating too darn much!), the conventional wisdom was that fat people are fat because they eat too much food. Period. This view, that only the quantity and not the quality of food that people eat makes a difference, had a stranglehold on mainstream medicine—a stranglehold that continued through the twentieth century with the cooperation of the sycophantic American Dietetic Association and is only now, in the twenty-first century, beginning to loosen.
    To give you a sense of the spirit of the era, the medical correspondent of The London Times, on March 11, 1957, wrote at the time of Mackarness’s book: “It is no use saying as so many women do: ‘But I eat practically nothing.’ The only answer to this is: ‘No matter how little you imagine you eat, if you wish to lose weight you must eat less. ’” (Emphasis mine.)
    Mackarness comes out swinging, right in his author’s introduction, leaving no doubt what “side” of the quality-versus-quantity argument he’s on: “Starch and sugar are the causes of obesity. Particularly modern refined and processed starches and sugars, the ever ready, highly publicized carbohydrate foods of twentieth-century urban man.” He puts forth the interesting argument—foreshadowing much of what we hear today in the discussions of metabolic type—that there are two kinds of people, whom he characterizes as Mr. Constant-Weight and Mr. Fatten-Easily.
    According to Mackarness, if you give both types the same exercise and feed them the same food, one will stay the same weight while the other will gain. When Mr. (or Ms.) Constant-Weight—people we hate who seem to be able to eat anything and not gain an ounce—take in too much carbohydrate, the extra food simply causes a revving-up in their metabolism that burns the extra calories consumed, and they stay the same weight. Nothing is left over for laying down fat. “But,” Mackarness writes, “when Mr. Fatten-Easily eats too much bread, cake, and potatoes, the picture is entirely different: his metabolic rate does not increase. Why does he fail to burn up the excess? The answer is the real reason for his obesity: Because he has a defective capacity for dealing with carbohydrates.”
    Mackarness was suggesting a metabolic disorder, and he was on to something. He was really the first diet-book author to postulate some sort of metabolic defect in the way some people process food (especially carbohydrates) that causes them to send much of what they eat to their fat stores. Dr. Alfred Pennington (of the DuPont-execs study) had come to the same conclusion. Summing up a 1953 paper called “Obesity: Overnutrition or Disease of Metabolism?” published in the American Journal of Digestive Diseases, Pennington wrote: “Analysis of the results … appear[s] to necessitate an explanation of obesity on the basis of some intrinsic metabolic defect.”
    Writing for the general public, Mackarness had a simpler