“Doing Banting”: High-Protein Diets in the Victorian Period and Now

In 1863, the English undertaker, William Banting, published and circulated one thousand copies of his pamphlet A Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public at his own expense. In the opening, Banting explains his motivation: he had recently read an article about corpulence in the Cornhill Magazine and had been pleased with some but not all of it. Imagining that the Cornhill would be unlikely to publish a letter by an unknown such as himself, he feels compelled to share his recent experiences with his fellow men with whatever means he can. The resulting pamphlet has the tone of earnestness, benevolence, conversion, and proselytizing. Banting is spreading the word of a miracle cure to benefit all of mankind from this “parasite” otherwise called “corpulence”; he acknowledges its hold on him for decades, doctors’ inability to relieve him of this “disease,” the ignobility, shame, and discomfort it has caused him, as well as the ultimate disappearance of these difficulties when cured. The pamphlet was immensely popular. So much so that the term “Banting”–as in “He is doing Banting,” “England is bantingised,” or “he ought to bant”–became humorously synonymous in England for a time with “slimming” or “reducing.”

Banting’s “system,” as he called it, has been cited by recent high-protein/low-carbohydrate diet advocates as a precursor to their own (Eades 16; Atkins 4). In recent years, best-selling guides prominently displayed at Barnes & Noble counters have included the Eadeses’ Protein Power, the Hellers’ Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet, Robert Atkins’ Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, and the New Orleans diet, Sugar Busters!. High-protein diets have been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show and investigated by 20/20 because of their apparent efficacy without hunger or self-denial. Bookstores sell low-carbohydrate cookbooks and restaurants in several parts of the country offer high-protein options. These programs vary in detail but all, including Banting’s, recommend drastically reducing carbohydrate intake while increasing protein intake, in comparison with a typical Western diet.

Since the Victorian period, scientific explanations of why high-protein diets produce weight loss have shifted significantly. Victorians typically explained that “saccharine and farinaceous” food fattened the body because they were made up largely of carbon and hydrogen, the same elements that make up human fat; thus, substituting protein for carbohydrates would naturally lead to weight loss. More recent diets are based on insulin theory. Carbohydrates trigger the production of insulin in order to lower the body’s blood sugar level; but insulin also stores energy, increases the body’s production of cholesterol, and increases the size of artery walls, thus contributing to weight gain and heart disease. (Eades 32-33). Furthermore, the frequent production of insulin to drive down blood sugar can produce “insulin insensitivity,” forcing the body to increase the amount of insulin produced each time needed for the task. Replacing carbohydrates with proteins causes weight loss because it prompts a “healthier” balance of insulin and glucagon (the hormone that raises blood sugar and stimulates the expenditure of energy). While both Victorian and recent high-protein diets make health claims, the Victorians were only beginning to construct a seemingly apolitical, scientific discourse connecting weight and weight loss with disease and health, a link now entrenched in Western culture.

Despite these differing scientific paradigms, the Victorian and recent high-protein diets are remarkably similar in content. Both prescribe a diet consisting primarily of meats and fish, with an avoidance of sweets, breads, and starchy vegetables. Because the Victorians did not use the terms “proteins” and “carbohydrates,” the Victorian diet excludes and allows some items that would be inexplicable with today’s food classification system. For example, Banting’s system recommends avoiding pork and veal which are now recommended along with other proteins; and Banting recommends liquor (inexplicably forbidding port)—yet current books warn against liquor because it stimulates insulin production. Nonetheless, recent high-protein diet books are right to cite Banting as a precursor: even more striking than similarities in content are parallels in rhetoric used by diet advocates, as well as their critics, during these two historical moments.

Banting and his Critics

A Letter on Corpulence features familiar rhetorical elements of self-help tracts: Banting asserts a purely benevolent purpose for sharing his diet, insists upon personal experience and testimonials as proof of its efficacy, and calls for the affect and sympathy of his readers. He writes, “I have . . . only to offer my personal experience as the stepping-stone to public investigation, and to proceed with my narrative of facts, earnestly hoping the reader will patiently peruse and thoughtfully consider it, with forbearance for any fault of style or diction, and for any seeming presumption in publishing it” (6). This apologetic tone of earnest benevolence pervades Banting’s narrative as he tells of having searched from doctor to doctor in vain for a cure for corpulence. He assures readers that his own corpulence is not due to genetics, nor to indolence, nor to excessive eating or self-indulgence—all causes that had been discussed in the Cornhill article to which he is responding. Merely the common English diet was at fault, he asserts: “I partook of the simple aliments of bread, milk, butter, beer, sugar, and potatoes more freely than my aged nature required, and hence, as I believe, the generation of the parasite, detrimental to comfort if not really to health” (7). Although Banting denies pain and illness, he reports suffering from “public remarks,” the trouble of fitting in seats in public assemblies, difficulty tying his shoes and attending to other daily offices, having been “compelled to go down stairs slowly backwards to save the jar of increased weight upon the ankle and knee joints, and [having] been obliged to puff and blow with every light exertion” (9-10). After many vain attempts to find a doctor with a cure for corpulence, and after futile experiments with Turkish baths and the like, it is ironically diminished sight and hearing that incidentally lead Banting to his miracle. His ear surgeon suspects a constriction of the ear canals, Banting reports, and advises him to abstain from what Banting terms “human beans”—”bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer, and potatoes”—so called because they are as harmful to older persons as are beans to horses (36, 11). Banting cautions corpulent men to act only under full consultation with a doctor but nonetheless describes in detail his new daily menu:

For breakfast, I take four or five ounces of beef, mutton, kidneys, broiled fish, bacon, or cold meat of any kind except pork; a large cup of tea (without milk or sugar), a little biscuit, or one ounce of dry toast

 

For dinner, five or six ounces of any fish except salmon, any meat except pork, any vegetable except potato, one ounce of dry toast, fruit out of a pudding, any kind of poultry or game, and two or three glasses of good claret, sherry, or Madeira—champagne, port and beer forbidden.

For tea, two or three ounces of fruit, a rusk or two, and a cup of tea without milk or sugar.

For supper, three or four ounces of meat or fish, similar to dinner, with a glass or two of claret.

For nightcap, if required, a tumbler of grog—(gin, whisky, or brandy, without sugar)—or a glass or two of claret or sherry. (15)

Thus having “suffered no inconvenience whatever in the probational remedy,” Banting illustrates with a table that he has lost forty-six pounds over the course of one year. The long list of additional beneficial results include his having “not felt so well as now for the last twenty years; the ability to “come down stairs forward naturally, with perfect ease”; the ability to “perform every necessary office” for himself; and improved sight and hearing (15). He admits to no understanding of the science behind these results, but exclaims with melodramatic urgency, “Oh!, that the Faculty would look deeper into and make themselves better acquainted with the crying evil of obesity–that dreadful tormenting parasite on health and comfort” (14).

The pamphlet circulated rapidly. Shortly after distributing his first thousand copies of A Letter on Corpulence in 1863, Banting printed and distributed a second batch of fifteen-hundred—again at his own expense, he assures readers (Banting, “Profits”). In the following year, 1864, he printed at least fifty-thousand copies in third and fourth editions. Banting sold these later editions (in both England and America) but he reasserted his benevolent intentions by publishing a record of his profits as donations to charities, including the Royal Home for Incurables and the National Orthopedic Hospitals (Banting, “Profits”). Responses came from many quarters. The London Times published consenting testimonials and debates over the diet’s particularities; literary magazines published reviews and critiques; and a scientific meeting of The British Association referred to and took issue with the narrowness of Banting’s system.

Banting used critics’ comments as opportunities to defend, elaborate upon, and further publicize his system. For example, in one appendix added to the fourth edition, Banting’s surgeon, William Harvey, explains in measured, pedantic detail how he had come to connect Banting’s hearing problem with “hypertrophy of the adipose tissue,” to connect corpulence with diabetes, and to recognize that the treatment effective for diabetes might also work to reduce corpulence (Banting, Letter 34). Harvey’s endorsement serves to verify and scientifically authorize “the truth of the pamphlet” (29), while underscoring by juxtaposition Banting’s rhetorical reliance on humble affect and personal experience. Furthermore, Banting affirms the pamphlet’s popularity by noting that his system has been imitated: he introduces Harvey’s endorsement by stressing, as dictated by “public duty,” that Harvey is not the same “Dr. John Harvey, who has published a Pamphlet on Corpulence assimilating with some of the features and the general aspect of mine” (Banting, Letter 33). Banting’s first letter to The Times, published in March 1864, humorously spoke to his pamphlet’s popularity and the skepticism it provoked with the same humble, disingenuous tone that pervades A Letter on Corpulence: “Sir:–I should esteem it a favour if you would permit me through your columns to contradict a very prevalent report that I have been dangerously ill and have died in consequence of practicing a dietary system for the cure of corpulence, on which I have published a pamphlet. I cannot imagine how such a report could have arisen, as I have not been ill, and have continued to enjoy the same sound health that I have ever felt since I adopted the dietary [sic]. I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, Wm Banting” (Banting, “Mr. Banting”).

Banting’s melodramatic earnestness and evident naivetë quickly became fodder for journalists, satirists, and critics among the cultural elite, who parodied his style and collectively constructed Banting as a naïve dupe. In response to Banting’s initial letter to The Times, Punch published the parody, “The Banting Code.” It began,

Some glutton has stated that brave Mr. Banting

Himself has succumbed to the system he taught.

’Tis false, and he lives, neither puffing nor panting,

But down to a hundred and fifty pounds brought.

Skeptics of the diet’s effectiveness particularly enjoyed the fact that he recommended drinking claret, sherry, and grog with meals, as well as indulging in four meals a day. In October, Punch published a satirical announcement of a new business: “The Banting Restaurant Joint Stock Company (Limited) . . . formed for the purpose of enabling persons endowed with a hearty appetite, to gratify it without incurring the penalty of corpulence, too generally consequent of its indulgence. The undertaking [a pun on Banting’s occupation as mortician] contemplated by this Society is that of establishing Dining Halls and Refreshment Rooms, at which the bill of fare shall be framed on the dietetic principles recommended by Mr. Banting.” One of the pamphlet’s more virulent critiques, “Mr. Banting’s Parasite,” suggested that the system worked only because Banting’s previous diet, replete with bread, milk, butter, beer, sugar, and potatoes, “was unconsciously qualifying [him] for the Agricultural Show at Islington” (“Mr. Banting’s Parasite” 269).

Some reviewers offered more extensive and serious social criticism, pointing out, for example, that his diet was affordable only by rich men, that it was not a new dietary system at all, or arguing that Banting’s (and other Victorians’) desire to lose weight was reaching fetishized proportions. For example, in Blackwood’s (unsigned) review, “Banting on Corpulence,” W. E. Aytoun defends the medical community against Banting’s charges of ignorance and writes that “if Mr Banting ate, drank, and slept well, and was affected by no actual complaint, we really cannot understand why he should have been so pertinacious in demanding medical assistance” (609). Even these critics, however, did not refrain from making Banting a figure of ridicule and exploiting his melodramatic pathos for humorous effect. Aytoun opens by comically drawing on cultural stereotypes that equate corpulence with goodliness and thinness with deviousness. He argues with mock seriousness for corpulence as a social value: “It is your attenuated thief who insinuates himself under beds, skulks behind counters, dives into tills, or makes prey of articles of commerce arrayed at shop-doors for the temptation of the credulous passenger. . . . Corpulence, we maintain, is the outward sign not only of a good constitution, but of inward rectitude and virtue” (607-608).

Aytoun goes on to point out that “Bishops, Deans, Mayors, Provosts, Aldermen, Bailies, and even Dowagers of high degree” all associate a privileged social status and good name with obesity; yet he continues paradoxically to suggest that Banting’s desire for thinness is an ambition for greatness, and an over-reaching ambition:

We deny that a man weighing but a trifle above fourteen stone is entitled to call himself obese. It may be that such a one is not qualified to exhibit himself as a dancer on the tight rope, or to take flying leaps in the character of Harlequin; neither should we be inclined to give the odds in his favour if he were to enter himself as a competitor for the long race at a Highland meeting. But gentlemen in the position of Mr Banting, who, we believe, has retired into private life after a successful business career, are not expected to rival Leotard, or to pit themselves in athletic contests against hairy-houghed Donald of the Isles. (610)

Invoking images of the previously heavier Banting doing gymnastics, Aytoun depicts the mortician as a comical figure competing in athletics with men much younger and thinner than himself.

This charge, of desiring to appear youthful when older, resonates with charges of social climbing. One reason for ridiculing Banting as overly ambitious seems to have been that Banting’s discussion of personal experience, his mundane talk of the body without shame, was coded as a lower, middle-class public display of personal, private grooming. A Letter did not respect the upper-middle-class understanding that detailed, mundane discourse about the body was a private, not public matter. Thus, Chambers’s Journal reported indignantly that Banting “narrates every ludicrous inconvenience that has happened to himself, on account of his great size, with calmness, and even unction.” With a play on the term “gentleman,” the article continues, “the pamphlet is written to describe how . . . every gentleman who is fatter than he should be, may become as slim and genteel as he pleases, by attending to certain simple rules” (“Mr. Banting’s Parasite” 269). Punch’s Restaurant Joint Stock Company announcement asserts that “The Directors of the Banting Restaurant Company confidently trust to enable the gourmand to combine enjoyment with gracility . . .” (“Banting Restaurant” 143). And, The Temple Bar review notes, “But, after all, it is not every one that is fit at the moment to give up sack and live cleanly, as a nobleman should” (“Doing Banting” 119). Banting himself had mentioned neither “grace” nor “nobility” but rather greater mobility afforded by his weight loss. Banting’s desire to be thin was read by skeptics among the cultural elite as a desire to be more “genteel,” as vulgar social climbing by the mercantile middle class.

In sum, the backlash to Banting’s popularity evidences a split between a populist discourse, made up of testimonials, personal experience, self-diagnoses and self-help, and a literary culture, whose language, publishing venues, and uses of satire positioned the Victorian intellectual elite as more sophisticated than such mundane confessions of the body allowed. While critics presented useful social critiques of the emerging and too-easy equation between poor health and fat and worked to undermine a nineteenth-century movement toward leanness, they did so at Banting’s expense. If he suffered ridicule when corpulent, as Banting asserted, he was further ridiculed for his ambition and publicized desire to conform.

What is remarkable about these reviews, which collectively construct Banting as an oafish dupe, is that none considers the possibility that Banting’s naive joviality was strategic populist rhetoric. Banting is at pains to let readers know that he has not gained monetarily from his endeavors, ultimately submitting to The Times a record of his publishing costs and charitable donations (which The Times snidely titled “The Profits of Corpulence”). However, if Banting did not retain profits, it is nonetheless probable that he enjoyed publicity and manipulated his newfound notoriety. Addressing criticism, he defends his use of the melodramatic metaphor “parasite,” his claim to the system’s novelty, and the charge that only the wealthy could follow his diet; yet, he is never defensive in tone. Banting defers to scientific knowledge (even when responding to those who criticize him on scientific bases), he humbly disclaims any knowledge aside from personal experience and the “hundreds” of testimonials he has received, and he reaffirms his purely disinterested intentions: “My own (almost miraculous) benefits from the mere change of simple for generous food was so truly inexplicable to my ignorant mind that I earnestly desired to see the subject thoroughly investigated for the sake of others; and hence my gratuitous labour, trouble, and expense with the first two editions of my pamphlet” (Banting, “Banting System”). Taking Banting’s Dickensian rhetoric of humility at face value and ignoring Banting’s effective and perhaps purposeful manipulation of publicity allowed the cultural elite to express classed condescension toward self-improvement.

It was not, however, that members of this elite did not themselves practice Banting’s prescription. Toward the end of 1864, George Eliot wrote to a friend, “I have seen people much changed by the Banting system. Mr. A. [Anthony] Trollope is thinner by means of it, and is otherwise the better for the self-denial,” she adds (Eliot 170). But publicly, Trollope would laugh at Banting, satirically referring to him in an 1880 novel as one of the great benevolent men of the nineteenth century for having “preserved us all so completely from the horrors of obesity” (qtd. in Glendenning 22). The “system,” too, was certainly a wealthy man’s diet. Concurrent discussions in the Times over the high cost of even rice for the poor attests to this fact, as does Punch’s final tribute to Banting. Here, a “needy” young man suggests to his uncle that he pay off the young man’s debts, thereby slimming through ensuing poverty rather than through the expensive system of “Banting” (“Banting be Blowed,” Punch 1965 Almanack). The system would have excluded the very poor and was practiced by members of the Victorian cultural elite. However, the slimming body paradoxically provided grounds upon which the cultural or literary elite could distance themselves rhetorically from the “vulgarity” of the rest of the middle class.

The debate was not only classed, but was gendered. Although women in the nineteenth century participated in various weight-loss attempts—the most notorious being the drinking of vinegar solutions by young women—Banting clearly has corpulent men and not women in mind as the intended recipients of his benevolence. The system resonated with hunting and male athletic traditions. As Aytoun pointed out in Blackwood’s, athletic trainers had been prescribing protein diets to athletes for decades. According to Roberta J. Park in an article on “Antecedents of Modern Sports Medicine,” Victorian trainers commonly recommended eating undercooked beef and mutton because its visual resemblance to human muscle mass suggested it would increase strength, while “vegetables–including potatoes–were eschewed” (142-43). Furthermore, Banting asserts that while on the diet he experienced neither self-denial nor hunger, claims which would have appealed to a masculine culture of privilege. Finally, the developing link between corpulence and ill-health may have made it possible for men to participate in these regimens in ways not possible had looks and comfort alone been the stated goals. In the nineteenth century, as male vanity became increasingly associated with the aristocracy, and as the middle class defined themselves against this aristocracy—science, strength, robustness, and good health became more acceptable bodily discourses for middle-class men than appeals to appearance.

In the scientific (and populist scientific) response to Banting, this discourse of masculinity was inflected with assumptions of English racial superiority. Natural and social scientists compared the relative health and strength of England’s beef-eating classes with the inhabitants of India, Ireland, and the West Indies, as well as the urban poor (often Irish immigrants) in England’s northern, industrial cities. In March 1864, a Dr. Edward Smith of the Zoological Society of the British Association gave a talk calling for greater attention to diet on the part of medical practitioners, suggesting that their neglect of the subject left the field open to zealots like Banting. Experimenting in diet without scientific knowledge, he argued, was dangerous. Smith called for both moderation and diversity in food intake, and criticized any system that would eliminate foods as nutritious as potatoes and corn. According to The Times’ minutes of the meeting at which Smith delivered his paper, Smith noted with irony “that potatoes are eminently unfit to form the staple of a national diet, and yet the Irish peasantry not only thrive on them, but send over to this country such specimens of manly strength and female beauty as to deceive Adam Smith into a very delusive theory. Rice is still worse, and yet among the Hindoos, who eat hardly anything else, there are coolies who carry incredible weights at a pace which no English porter could approach” (Untitled). Smith acknowledged that the reason for this minimal nutritional subsistence was economic, these being poor countries and potatoes and rice being cheap crops. The report generated several jingoistic responses by the Times’ editors and readers asserting the strength of English navvies, who fed largely upon beef diets, over the strength and stamina of colonial subjects. One correspondent concluded, “No one ever got any hard, continuous work out of rice or potato-fed labourors” (Thomson). Banting, himself one of the respondents, wrote, “I have been informed that the negroes in the West Indies fatten materially in the sugar harvest, and that horses and cattle lean and out of order are speedily put into good condition by doses of molasses in their drink” (Banting, “Sugar”). He seems not to have noticed the fact that molasses’s beneficial effects on energy, here, contradict the high energy claims he makes for his low sugar diet elsewhere, but the point is that such dehumanizing comparisons of Indians, West Indians, and the Irish with cattle in terms of productivity was a staple of both the scientific and pseudo-scientific discussions. This nationalistic and racist rhetoric of English superiority fueled the popularity of Banting’s system for a time.

Nevertheless, the system’s popularity seems to have been short-lived. After 1864, “banting” passed into the vernacular as a verb; the OED cites derivations of the term used as late as the 1880s. But after 1864, the flurry of articles and letters that praised or critiqued Banting’s system disappeared and the term was used only casually as shorthand for reducing, dieting, or the eschewing of sugar, often in satirical contexts. In 1867, only three years after Banting’s great year of popularity, The Temple Bar lampooned Banting’s pamphlet with verses titled “A Consultation” as though readers may have forgotten the term’s origins. The piece satirically recounts Banting’s and Harvey’s meeting, summarizes Banting’s system, and reflects that “Doing Banting” had become a commonly used term. The writer concludes by predicting that the system would outlive its individual practitioners: “If you suffer in the attempt, blame yourself, not the system, which, based upon the principles of nature, will live long after your body has become the victim of the laws of the affinity of its components, and has been consigned, with all the pomp of unreal pageantry, to that bourne from which even doing Banting cannot exempt it, and from whence no traveller returns” (“Doing Banting” 119). Although apparently ironic, the pronouncement was also prescient, given the recent upsurgence of interest in high-protein diets.

High Protein Diets Now

High-protein diets of late utilize rhetorical conventions similar to Banting’s to popularize and market their ideas. While most recent promotors, unlike Banting, explain for lay readers the medical science behind the diets’ results, they also rely on personal experience, accidental discoveries, case studies, and testimonials. These authors also typically assert their disinterested benevolence in sharing information. The creators of Sugar Busters! suggest that the nutrition industry has “hoaxed” the public for decades by promoting a carbohydrate-laden diet, but Doctors like themselves thankfully provide a corrective because they are in the disinterested business of making patients well (Steward 24). Robert Atkins implies his own financial disinterest in asking, “Can [ignorance of protein’s value] be related, in part, to the vast financial endowment powered into the various department of nutritional education by the manufacturers of our refined carbohydrate foodstuffs?” (Atkins 4-5). And, as Banting distinguishes his surgeon Dr. Harvey from an implied imposter, all of these authors work to distinguish their diets from those of their competitors for possibly confused readers. The Eadeses thus recommend Barry Sears’ The Zone as “worthwhile reading” but note that “Dr. Sears takes a somewhat different approach from ours” (Eades 412).

Such conventions of self-help discourse suggest veracity and authority in a competitive market. However, market-driven strategies commonly rely upon and reinforce problematic and even damaging cultural assumptions. Like Banting’s, recent high-protein diet promotions are largely masculinist. They make health rather than appearance claims (to lower the factors that contribute to heart disease), and they emphasize the lack of hunger or self-denial involved. Thus, they permit straight, white, middle-class men to publicly partake in a dieting culture without facing feminization or homophobic ridicule. Diets, that is, are no longer exclusively part of women’s magazine culture, nor nutrition predominately of concern to gay men. However, this shift does little to challenge the gendered and homophobic logic of privilege on which it depends. One result is that women’s health needs are neglected. Of currently popular protein diet books, none lays out in detail women’s distinctive health and nutritional needs in relation to high protein diets. Nor do they address health risks or probable benefits specific to age-groups or races.

Second, similar to the scientific and populist-scientific responses to Banting’s system, most recent promoters make nutritional claims based on cross-cultural comparisons or nutritional anthropology. Egyptian mummies reveal a population of grain eaters who are fat and unhealthy. The Eskimo, whose diet consists largely of fish, are virtually free of heart disease.  The question of scientific veracity aside, such cultural comparisons appeal to Americans’ sense of cultural superiority. Underlying these comparisons is a false assumption that all Americans, by contrast with more homogenous and “primitive” peoples, have ultimate diversity in, access to, and choice over the foods they eat.

Finally, similar to the split between Victorian popular dieting discourse and the cultural elite’s criticism, a schism is now evident between “earnest” protein diet promoters and journalists who practice “sophisticated” skepticism. Time Magazine and 20/20 challenge advocates’ credentials, mock their sincerity and unseemly talk of the body, and interview researchers who undermine the diets’ science claims. Time Magazine points out that Rachael Heller calls herself “Dr.” and wears a white lab coat while only a PhD. The author mocks her reliance on personal experience: “Though her science may be suspect, her earnestness is not. During the meal, she leans over the table to confide details from her fat, ugly past”; and he goes on to relate Heller’s whispered confessions of stretch marks (Stein 75-77). Here, the contemporary and Victorian media parallel is inexact. The influence of advertising on American journalism has intensified, and the equation of thinness with health is so firmly entrenched that today’s press is less likely to challenge the cultural norms privileging thinness itself than were the Victorians. Thus, contemporary mainstream American news magazines and programs commonly conclude by backing away from the science-based claims they make against these diets: Time Magazine’s skeptical cover-page article is followed by a testimonial for the diet by a doctor, “now a convert,” titled “How I Became a Low-Carb Believer” (Merrell). Still, like the Victorians’, this split between a populist dieting discourse and a skeptical elite reinforces a classed sense of superiority based on the shaming of both the unrepentant “overweight” (who are solely responsible for their lack of health) and of those who mundanely celebrate weight-loss, appearance, and the body.

As did banting, contemporary interest in high-protein diets might disappear within a short while. However, more general interest in self-help diet and nutrition books shows no sign of abating. In some senses, this discourse provides needed alternatives to established norms: as the FDA struggles to regulate the burgeoning self-treatment industry, and as pharmaceutical companies look for ways to profit from it, books, newsgroups, and community-based grocery stores provide alternatives to overly-generalized nutritional standards authorized by government and to expensive, patented pharmaceuticals promoted by industry. Furthermore, the self-help rhetoric of testimonials, case studies, and emotional affect may usefully challenge a classed divide between public and private discourses of the body. However, in as much as they are also driven by mass marketing, these apparently alternative sources of information may rely upon and reinforce damaging cultural assumptions and prejudices about weight, class, race, and gender, as did Banting and his critics.

Michelle Mouton

Department of English

Cornell College

600 First Street west

Mount Vernon, Iowa 52314-1098

Works Cited

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Atkins, Barrry. Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution. New York: Avon, 1992.

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Banting, William. “The Banting System.” Letter in reply to London correspondent. Times [London] 27 Sept. 1864: 9.

—. Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. 4^th ed. New York, 1864.

—. “Mr. Banting and His System.” Letter. Times [London] 16 Mar. 1864: 143.

—. “The Profits of Corpulence.” Letter. Times [London] 2 Nov. 1864: 5.

—. “Sugar in Corpulency.” Letter in reply to letter of F.R.S. Times [London] 15 Oct 1864: 11.

“Doing Banting.” Temple Bar 19 (1867): 117-119.

Eades, Michael, and Mary Eades. Protein Power. New York: Bantam, 1996.

Eliot, George. “To Charles Bray.” 15 Dec. 1864. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. Vol. 4. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. 169-170.

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Gittleman, Ann Louise, and J. Maxwell Desgrey. Beyond Pritikan: A Total Nutrition Program for Rapid Weight Loss, Longevity, and Good Health. New York: Bantam, 1996.

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Oliphant, Margaret. A House Divided Against Itself, Chapter 27. Living Age 166 (1885): 257-320. Rpt. from Chamber’s Journal.

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Sears, Barry. The Zone: A Dietary Road Map. New York: HarperCollins. 1995.

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