This high-carb fetish is relatively recent. I can remeber when I was 12-13 (the age girls start learning about "dieting," the accepted thing to do (this was in the 1950s) was to cut down/out on starch. Skip the potatoes and the bread. This had been what our mothers had done and their mothers before them. In fact, it was understood in those days that fairly poor people were often fat (I'm not talking about the actually starving) because they filled up on the cheap foods like potatoes and bread. When I was in college in the mid-1960s, the table for the girls dieting was nicknamed the "Rabbits' table" because the girls were served salad and meat/fish/cheese/eggs but no potatoes, bread or other starchy food.

Remember, I'm talking about the late 1950-early 1960s here, in England. The fashion for proposing high-carb weight-loss diets is so recent as to be little more than a fad. I'm curious as to why it was swallowed so wholeheartedly and is still being promoted with such militance in the US that it's also started to catch on in the UK.