Dr. Beth Gruber

CarbSmart Magazine serving the low carb community, has taken its digital presence to the Apple iPad, Google Android and Amazon Kindle tablets.

For the past several months, I've been writing articles about the history of diets and dieting. Eventually, I would have written about Dr. Atkins. 'Eventually' came too soon.

We've been talking about diet medications, and most recently, about Fen/phen. There seems to be a constant hunt for chemicals that will make one slim. Today we'll take a look at some of the herbal preparations for obesity that are vying for our consumer dollars.

In my last article, I discussed the development of the diet pill phenomenon. This brilliant marketing strategy changed the course of the medical treatment for obesity by grouping together different kinds of drugs that might (or might not, for that matter) have some relation to weight loss, and then selling the patient all the drugs at once. The plan was enormously lucrative for the drug companies who manufactured the chemicals, and also for the so-called "fat doctors" who prescribed them. But before we put all the blame on the drug companies and the doctors, we must face a certain reality. The public was very willing to hear the message that overweight can be treated with chemicals.

In this series of articles, I've been talking about diets and dieting. We've looked at plans and paraphernalia, machines, food combination diets, calorie counting, meals in cans, and weight loss clubs. The easy answer to losing weight continues to evade discovery.

We are continuing our discussions of diets, dieting, and the various ways people have attempted to lose weight. In the last article we looked at the phenomenon of women's magazines as a huge factor in the return of calorie counting after World War II. And we saw the rise of meals in a can, which are still with us today.

Last time we continued our discussion of the history of diets and dieting by talking about the first low calorie diet plan, and about the beginnings of counting calories. We also looked at diets that were based on 'magic pairs' and on special food combinations said to promote weight loss because of some supposedly long-forgotten-but-now-rediscovered chemical connection between the two foods. These connections were said to somehow fool the body into absorbing less nutrients than the individual foods, eaten separately, would provide.

We've been discussing the history of diets and dieting. It may seem obvious to you that the idea of the calorie, at least as it pertains to dieting, must have been with us since the beginning of dieting. However, such is not the case. As we discussed last time, it wasn't until the 1890s and early 1900s that chemists Wilbur Atwater and Russell Chittenden did the initial work of measuring food as units of heat that could be produced by burning it. But from the get-go, the calorie concept has never been nearly as scientific as it may appear.

Our low carbohydrate way of life is not new, dear readers. Last time I told you that the world's very first diet book was a low carbohydrate plan written in the mid 1800s by William Banting. Banting was told about this approach to obesity control by his ear doctor, Dr. William Harvey. Dr. Harvey said that he had heard about healthful advantages from a diet low in sugar and starch while he was in Germany and Paris. He related that he had traveled to attend a lecture given at Stuttgart by a celebrated physician and professor, Dr. Niemeyer. Dr. Harvey had also gone to Paris to hear a certain Doctor Bernard report on using the diet plan for treatment of diabetes.

We've been talking about diets and dieting. Dieting for weight loss has really only been a potential issue for the average person in the last few hundred years because prior to that, most people's problem was getting enough food, not getting too much. But by the mid 1800s obesity was becoming a problem for some people.