The Skinny on Weight Loss: Part V 

Doesn’t it make sense that if a diet is scientifically valid, (can be explained using not a few obscure scientific articles but standard medical textbooks) and has a rich historical heritage, that it will be a successful and healthy diet — not just for some, but for everyone?

Paleopathologists (scientists that study disease processes in ancient people) and anthropologists have known for years that the agricultural revolution and the resulting increased consumption of carbohydrates played havoc with the health of early man.

Every doctor knows that the immediate effect of carbohydrate consumption is increased blood glucose, then an increased insulin level.  Researchers the world over are finding elevated insulin levels associated with obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes, the common diseases of modern man.

However, many are recommending to their patients high-carbohydrate, low fat diets — which probably caused the problem in the first place. Doesn’t it make sense that if excess insulin indeed causes these disorders, that controlling excess insulin and resetting a dysfunctional pancreas would reverse the problem?

The history of dieting begins in 1825, when a French lawyer Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin published an essay entitled Preventative or Curative Treatment of Obesity in his gastronomic classic” The Physiology of Taste,” in which he stated: “Now, an antifat diet is based on the commonest and most active cause of obesity, since, it has been clearly shown, it is only because of grains and starches that fatty congestion can occur, as much in man as in the animals; this effect…plays a large part in the commerce of fattened beasts for our markets, and it can be deduced, as an exact consequence, that a more or less rigid abstinence from everything that is starchy or floury will lead to the lessening of weight.”  Brillat Savarin had obviously empirically stumbled onto the virtues of a restricted carbohydrate diet and published his findings.

In 1862 William Banting, an upscale London undertaker, found himself so obese that he could not tie his shoes and had to walk downstairs backward. He tried all the fashionable cures of the day without success until his physician put him on a diet free of starchy and sugary foods. Banting followed this diet to the letter and lost a pound a week until he reached a normal weight and restored his health and his ability to walk down the stairs face first.

He was so overjoyed with his success that, at his own expense, he published and distributed 2,500 copies of his “Letter on Corpulence,” describing his treatment and his own modification of the plan. Demand was so great for this pamphlet that it rapidly went through many editions on both sides of the Atlantic before his death at eighty-one years of age.His diet was so well known that his name became synonymous with dieting; people weren’t dieting, they were banting. In America, Banting’s lean-meat diet led to the development of the Salisbury steak, a staple of life in the late 1800s.

For the past 25 years, millions of Europeans have found rapid (3-7lbs/wk), and safe weight loss using the medically administered Ideal Protein diet/treatment. Why not you also? Come on Coeur d’ Alene, lets shape up and get healthy together.

For information on Dr. Grandstaff’s classes on weight loss please call (208) 772-6015.