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For those who didn't know, the full text of "Letter On Corpulence" is available online at:

http://www.lowcarb.ca/corpulence/index.html

Wa'il

Under "unique features", we should add not only that this was the first ever low-carb diet published (I have also read that it was the first published diet of any kind), but that it was also unique for the amount of alcohol it permitted.

I read the extended whole version, and was impressed, I'm an RN, and I ignorantly thought that nobody knew anything about medicine back then...somebody obviously did. I think it's inspiring, and fasinating, to be able to get a glimpse into the feelings and thoughts of someone going thru the same thing so long ago.

What was Bantling's objection to pork?

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.