Gary Taubes traces low-carb dieting back to 1825, when French physician Jean-Antoine-Catherine Brillat-Savarin warned that potatoes and bread cause weight gain. He argues the diet persisted for nearly two centuries through figures like William Banting and Robert Atkins, while the low-fat diet that rose in the 1960s was never properly tested for obesity before becoming a fad.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance.
I remember really well when the bulletproof diet, which involves cyclical keto, not eating sugar, not eating bad fats, stuff that you very are very familiar with. And someone, I think it was the New York Times or maybe the Telegraph, they're saying, well, how do you know this isn't just another fad diet? I'm like, guys, we're going on 50 years of starting from the year I was born, Robert Atkins published a book, and yet I was fat because. Because no one listens except for these brief periods. So if this is a fad diet, and fad diets last for 50 years, then yes, it's a fad diet. But I'm pretty sure keto is not going away because it's the only thing that works well.
And this is the thing. And first of all, it's not 50 years. It's actually in five years, it'll be 200 years.
Now, there you go from banting.
No, even before banting, it goes all the way back to this Frenchman, Brillat Saverin. So Bouillatte Savaran. He's a lawyer in Bon Vivant. He likes to live and he likes to eat. And he's struggling with his weight also. So he quits his law firm and he travels around. He writes about eating and he puts together this book called the Physiology of Taste, which has been in print since 1825. Not that many nonfiction books other than the Bible can make that claim. And in it he says, look, I talked to 500 people, all of them struggling with their weight. And they all, you know, if somebody's obese, then they're going to tell me, they love potatoes, they love bread, they love pasta, they love rice. These are the foods they can't live without. These are the foods we fatten animals with. You know, shocking. And sugars make everything worse. So in 1825, sugar was still hard to come by. And sugary beverages, like, basically, you know, you might get a lemonade at a cafe because they could put some sugar in water and stir it up and add lemons, but other than that. So he didn't think of sugars as a major problem, because if you got people not to eat grains, then they wouldn't eat pastries and they wouldn't get the sugar. But anyways, that's it. It's always been there. There's always been this idea that if you don't want to get fat, you had to avoid carbs. And I use this in the book. Ultimately, they low carb high fat ketogenic way of eating is a way of eating that. And I use Brillat Savron's 195 year old phrase more or less rigid abstinence from he said flowers and grains or fecula, which is another word for it that has gone out of style in the past 200 years. But that's it.
Wow.
The fad diet is the low fat diet that was introduced in the 1960s. It was supposed to be a way to prevent heart disease and then became an obesity diet. It had never been tested. It had never been tested for obesity. It required lowering fat and adding back carbs. So when the nutrition community starts to embrace a low fat diet for heart disease, they transform carbohydrates from something that every woman knew was fattening. This was the first line of a British Journal of Nutrition article in 1963, Every Woman Knows carbohydrates are fattening, which they did. And then by like 1985, 22 years later, they're heart healthy diet foods. And the personal health reporter in the New York Times is writing a best selling diet.
