Minimal carbs, lots of fat, incredible dieting results – but no science - The Globe and Mail

All human diets before agriculture were effectively carbohydrate-poor, and many, particularly in northern latitudes, were fat-rich. And until the industrial revolution, virtually all human diets were absent the highly refined grains and sugars that the LCHF philosophy specifies as the primary causes of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

As early as 1825, French culinary expert Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose The Physiology of Taste is among the most famous books ever written about food, was arguing that carbohydrates cause obesity. In the 1860s, the LCHF diet became widely known as a Banting diet, after British undertaker William Banting, who wrote the first bestselling diet book based on his LCHF conversion experience. Variations on LCHF then spread from England to the European continent, embraced by German medical authorities as the most effective diets for reversing obesity.

By the early 1950s, physicians from some of the best medical schools in the world – Harvard, Stanford and Columbia, for instance – were publishing articles in the academic literature advocating for LCHF diets to treat obesity, advising obese patients to eat "as much as [they] like" of meat, fish, fowl, eggs, animal fats, cheese and green vegetables, while avoiding all carbohydrate-rich foods and beverages, particularly "all sweets." This is what Hilde Bruch, the leading mid-20th-century authority on pediatric obesity, believed. It's what Benjamin Spock taught in six editions and almost 50 million copies of Baby and Child Care, the bible of child-rearing from the 1950s onward. "Rich desserts," Dr. Spock wrote, and "the amount of plain, starchy foods (cereals, breads, potatoes) taken is what determines, in the case of most people, how much [weight] they gain or lose."