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William Banting (1796 - 1878), was an English undertaker and dietician, and one of the first people to manage his weight by going on a formal low-carbohydrate diet to reduce his weight. His method for doing so was supervised by Dr. William Harvey, who notified the public of his success in 1863.
He wrote a booklet called "Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public" which contained the particular plan for the diet he followed. The pamphlet's popularity was such that the question "do you bant?" referred to his method, and eventually to dieting in general. Although originating from the English verb banting, this word is nowadays the Swedish verb meaning "to diet", bantning.
William Banting was a distant relative of Sir Frederick Grant Banting, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of insulin.[1]
Agatha Christie, the crime fiction writer, not infrequently used the term 'banting' in her novels. This was a convenient way of excluding characters from the possibility of ingesting poison, or making them more vulnerable. That is, if the murder-method was to poison the meal served generally, the character engaging in banting escaped. On the other hand, if that character was the target, their adherence to a special food regime meant they could more readily be targeted. It also meant that if character doing the banting was in fact the killer, s/he had a ready made excuse for not ingesting the food laced with poison. As a chemist, Agatha Christie had a repository of knowledge about poisons, their origin and effects, which in turn she used to good effect. (Along with the habit of dieting or, as she titled it consistent with the times, banting.)
In 1850s England, a man called William Banting was in a seriously obese state of affairs, and he had had enough of it. This unfortunate fellow was so fat that he supposedly could not tie his own shoes, and it is said that he had to go downstairs backwards. Despairing at the inability of the doctors to help him, their advice on exercise, steam baths, temporary starvations and chemical purges had all come to naught, he at last found something that worked.
One medical practitioner, a Doctor Harvey, had suggested that he might find the answer by not eating any more than a minimum of sugars and starches. Low carbohydrate diets had been born.
William Banting followed this advice, and lost fifty pounds in a year. So delighted at his success, he wrote a book, which was the world’s first diet book, to tell of his experience, the splendidly titled: “Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public,” that was published in 1862.
His obesity had been cured but the British Medical Association immediately attacked this approach, and because Banting was not a scientist, claimed that it had no scientific value and would not work for others. The public however were impressed, and people all over the English speaking world read of his plan and lost weight themselves, not caring about the doubters. So popular did it prove to be, that it was translated into other languages and thus spread even wider.
Banting died in 1878 and is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.[1]