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completely right—as it turns out, it’s both what you eat and how much.But he opened the door to the discussion that quality mattered as much as quantity, and that was a significant change from conventional thinking. Still is.)
    Banting became a man on a mission. Excited and inspired by his results on this high-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet—which was made up almost entirely of protein, fat, alcohol, and what was then called “roughage”—he published, at his own expense, the first commercial low-carb diet book, Letter on Corpulence . 1
    Banting identified sugar as the main cause of his own obesity, and his physician, Dr. Harvey, promptly put both flour and sugar on the forbidden list.
    It worked.
    The book eventually went into 4 editions, with the first 3 selling 63,000 copies in England alone, and it was translated into French and German and sold heavily in those countries, as well as in the United States. The fourth edition included letters of testimony from at least 1,800 readers who had written to Banting to support his assertions and praise the diet.
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    Once I did some reading, I
realized that low-carb diets
aren’t brand-new—they’ve
been advocated by some
forward-thinking scientists for
more than a century.
    —Gary S.
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    Banting, by the way, kept the weight off and lived comfortably until the age of 81.
    With Banting’s book, the nascent debate—is it what you eat or how much you eat that makes you fat?—was born, and it continues, alive and kicking, to this day. But the controversy didn’t gather its full head of steam until Wilbur Atwater figured out how to measure calories.
    It’s the Calories, Stupid! The Dominating Hypothesis in Weight Loss Is Born
    Sometime between 1890 and 1900, an agricultural chemist named Wilbur O. Atwater got the bright idea that if you stuck some food in a mini-oven called a calorimeter and burned the food to ash, you could measure the amount of heat it produced. He called the unit of measurement a calorie (technically, the amount of heat it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water from 14.5 to 15.5 degrees centigrade). He went to town. He constructed vast tables of the caloric content of various foods. (It’s important to remember that calories are not actually found in food; they’re a measure of how much heat or energy can be produced by food.) The idea that the human body behaves exactly like the chamber used in Atwater’s experiments—that we all “burn” calories exactly the same way and our bodies behave like calorimeters—has been the dominating hypothesis in weight loss to this day.
    And man, is it wrong. (More coming—stay tuned.)
    Later, some enterprising scientists extended the calorie theory even further. They began to measure how much heat was produced (read: how many calories were “burned”) in the course of daily activities, from resting to vigorous exercise, from sleeping to digesting food to running marathons.
    It was now possible to form an equation: calories in vs. calories out. The guiding concept of weight management was officially born.
    That theory is called the energy-balance theory, and it goes something like this: if you take in more calories than you burn up, you’ll gain weight. If you burn up more calories than you take in, you’ll lose weight. It doesn’t matter where those calories come from. It’s as simple as balancing a checkbook: spend more than you make, and you’re calorically in the red (and dipping into your fat stores to make up the difference); make more than you spend, and you’re in the black (and buying bigger jeans).
    It was the first law of thermodynamics in action. What goes in must either come out in some other form (like heat) or stay in (in the form of fat or muscle). What it can’t do is simply disappear.
    Yet Banting, unscientific though he was, had made an interesting observation, which was that what he ate made more of a difference to his fat cells than how much he ate. This notion