Living Low Carb Read Online Free PDF

was heresy to the calorie theorists who believed, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. It wasn’t until much later that the idea surfaced that calories from certain kinds of food (or combinations of food) might have a greater tendency to be stored in the body than others, or that people might vary widely in their metabolic ability to “burn” calories as opposed to “saving” them, or that the type of food eaten might actually trigger bodily responses that say “stay” or “go.”
    Meanwhile, calorie-counting had taken off with a vengeance. In 1917 (the same year, coincidentally, in which the ultraconservative American Dietetic Association was founded), an L.A. physician named Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters published what had to be the first calorie-counting book ever, Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories. She sold 2 million books, making it the first best-selling diet book in America. And here’s the thing: by making calorie-counting equivalent to weight control, she also injected her own view of morality into the equation. People who couldn’t control their calories (and therefore their weight) just lacked self-discipline. We can thank Dr. Peters for popularizing the concept that being overweight is a sign of moral weakness. And the idea that people are fat simply because they lack self-control is still very much alive and well today—witness, for example, the recent work of Dr. Phil McGraw. 2
    Calories in/calories out remains the dominant view of most mainstream weight-loss experts to this day, and it is even embraced to a degree by some of the gurus of the low-carb movement, albeit not nearly to the same extent as the mainstreamers, who have made it a virtual religion. All of the lowcarb theorists have to be seen against the backdrop of this calorie-counting orthodoxy. But throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, observations have indeed been made—and experiments performed—that have cast huge doubts on whether the calories in/calories out theory was the whole story or even the most important part of the story. Mind you, no one claims it is not part of the story—the argument is whether or not it is the whole story. Answer: It’s not.
    Eat and Grow Thin: Low-Carbing Reappears on the Scene
    In 1914, Vance Thompson, a nonscientist and the husband of a famous actress of the day, published a book called Eat and Grow Thin, 3 which touted the virtues of a low-carb diet. It suggested that corpulence was caused by eating the wrong kinds of food, not merely the wrong amounts, and singled out “starches, sugars, and oils” as particular culprits—pretty much what you’d expect from a guy whose most famous saying was “To the scientist there is nothing so tragic on earth as the sight of a fat man eating a potato.” His list of forbidden foods included the fattiest meats (like bacon); bread, biscuits, crackers, macaroni, and anything else made from the flour of wheat, corn, rye, barley, or oats, which included all breakfast foods and cereals; rice; potatoes, corn, dried beans, and lentils; milk, cream, butter, and cheese; oils and grease of any kind; pies, cakes, puddings, pastries, custards, ice cream, sodas, candies, bonbons, and sweets; and wines, beers, ales, and spirits.
    One can only imagine how many times he was asked the question we hear so often today: so, what’s left to eat?
    As it turns out, a lot. According to Thompson, the only things that had really been taken away were sugar, starch, oil, and alcohol. The rest of his book consisted of menus that included:
•  All kinds of meat (except pig in any form)
•  All kinds of game
•  All kinds of seafood—fish, lobsters, oysters, etc.
•  All kinds of fruit (except bananas and grapes)
•  All kinds of salad
•  Virtually all vegetables
    The low-carb gurus of today would have loved this, except they would have added some good fat to the mix.
    The book also contained this little caveat: