In the US they celebrate “National Keto Day” on January 5th. It’s a relatively new “Day of the year”, founded in 2019 by “The Vitamin Shoppe”
(I’d guess to “raise awareness” and assist their marketing. Not that they have talked about it on their website since by the looks…)
However, eating low carb with adequate protein and fat has been around since the early 19th century!
Where did it all start?
In 1862, the “cabinetmaker” (the 19th Century synonym for undertaker) William Banting self-published a pamphlet – “A Letter on Corpulence”
This was a free to the public documentary of the diet that ENT consultant, Mr William Harvey, F.R.C.S. prescribed him.
Banting visited Harvey for his deafness, not his waistline. Yet Harvey diagnosed this as fat pressing on his ears.
And he had so much success eating the way that Harvey prescribed him that he became an evangelist for the eating regimen!
At his own expense, Banting became the first low carbohydrate/Keto “vanity author”.
Banting gave the world three editions and his name became synonymous with dieting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Even now, Professor Tim Noakes calls his system “Banting”
Harvey wasn’t the first though…
Mr Harvey was building on the mid-19th Century works of Claude Bernard, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Francois Dance, Alfred William Moore and John Harvey.
The diet prescribed by Harvey to Banting was low in “farinaceous and saccharine matter” – starch and sugar, AKA carbohydrate in our modern language – and high in Fat and Protein.
Banting described what and how he ate from Dr Harvey’s diet in detail.
He also
- told us about the actions he had taken previously, resulting in him being unhappy and extremely fat.
- detailed his results with the new (to him) regime – and I thank him for doing it!
- and, noted that when Dr Felix Niemeyer of Stuttgart revised Harvey’s advice to also exclude “fatty matters”, it was simply not as effective.
Why did Dr Niemeyer suggest this?
The theory at the time believed that both carbohydrate and fat were “respiratory foods”.
It was believed that they “burned together in the lungs to produce heat”. And so by reducing the intake of both, over all energy intake would be decreased.
It is this altered regimen, “High-protein, restricted carbohydrate and fat” that formed mainstream dietary advice right up until around the late 1990’s!
I remember my first diet at Weight Watchers™ in the ’80’s, when I was 16, and I can describe the “Exchanges” programme it gave me in exactly these terms.
And of course, we now know that this is not the way the body works at all.
So, where is Keto now?
Originally developed as a treatment for epilepsy, the “medical ketogenic diet” was created in 1924 by Dr. Russell Wilder at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
The idea that a diet that excluded carbohydrate minimised protein and included high fat as well as abstaining/fasting for periods had been studied by the medical community and so Dr Wilder’s protocol formalising previous papers showed promise in regulating epilepsy.
Unfortunately, anticonvulsant medications appeared in the 1930s and so “food as the medicine” fell by the wayside.
I’m thankful that the development and use of anticonvulsant drugs hasn’t stopped a medically ketogenic diet being considered for use to control epilepsy in paediatric patients and “others with pharmacological resistance” though. Naturally, I’d prefer it to be the “default prescription”
It wasn’t until the 1970’s, after various authors and studies through the previous decades (Pennington with the “DuPont Project”, Kekwick and Pawan, Pilkington, Mackarness, Taller etc) looked at “lower carb (typically 60g a day), higher fat and otherwise eating ad libidum diets for weight loss” that a diet specifically designed to create ketosis/lipolysis in people made its way into popular use via Dr Atkins and his choice to severely restrict users to 20g of Carbohydrate, higher fat, generous protein and eating ad libidum as the guidance in his “Diet Revolution” (1972)
And as other authors wrote books and created their own spin, what Dr Atkins’ offered the world became known as “Keto”.
And it all started to get more and more complex, creating a new Diet Prison™ to keep ourselves in…
Which is of course why I created The HOPE Protocol to bust us all out of there, get back to being simple – Making choices and living life!
So, what are you going to do to celebrate National Keto Day?
