Banting by Tim Noakes. Book review.
The most googled diet of 2017 was invented 150 years ago.
I was talking to a client of mine about declining physical performance as we age, and how 50 is not 20. Somehow, somewhere in the middle there, in my 30s, I manage to feel and perform physically and mentally better than ever before. And I don’t think this is the limit, I believe I’m just starting out — and banting, ketogenic diet, high fat diet is one of the causes, one of the causes we all can get back to.
While searching for a cutting edge nutrition book I stumbled upon this short pocket guide to banting.
The Banting Pocket Guide by Tim Noakes, Bernadine Douglas
What is banting? Another fancy word like a ketogenic diet?
Well, banting, is actually a modified classical ketogenic diet, low carb high fat moderate protein diet.
In the middle of 19th century it was noticed, that carbohydrates, particularly processed carbohydrates, make us sick and fat. So if you think that low carbohydrate diet is a fad — it’s a persistent trend! It first appeared in the west, North America and Europe, in 1862 officially, when
“William Banting was a British undertaker who was very obese and desperately wanted to lose weight. In the year 1862 he paid a visit to his doctor, William Harvey, who proposed a radical eating plan that was high in fat but included very few carbohydrates. By following this eating plan Banting experienced such remarkable weight loss that he wrote an open letter to the public, the “Letter on Corpulence”, which became widely distributed. As more people started following this eating plan to lose weight, the term “banting” or to “bant” became popularised.
What are we designed to eat?
Banting merely discovered what human beings were designed to eat: what early humans ate 200,000 years ago. Respected biologists, geneticists, paleoanthropologists and theorists believe that human genes have hardly changed since human beings began their journey on earth. If you could put the entire human history into one day, we have only been eating cereals and grains for five minutes and sugar for five seconds, a very short amount of time in our existence. After the success experienced by William Banting on this low-carb, high-fat eating plan, the “banting” diet became the standard treatment for weight loss in all major European and North American medical schools. But in 1959 it was excluded from all the major medical and nutritional textbooks. “
Then almost a century later low carbohydrate diets were again in fashion popularized by Dr. Robert C. Atkins.
“In the past 12 years, over 20 studies have shown that low-carb diets are effective for weight loss (without calorie counting), and can lead to various health improvements.
The Atkins diet was originally promoted by a physician named Dr. Robert C. Atkins, who wrote a best-selling book about the diet in 1972.
Since then, the Atkins diet has been popular all over the world and many more books have been written about it.
The diet was originally considered unhealthy and demonized by the mainstream health authorities, mostly due to the high saturated fat content. However, new studies have shown that saturated fat is harmless (1, 2).
Since then, the diet has been studied thoroughly and shown to lead to more weight loss than low-fat diets, and greater improvements in blood sugar, HDL (the “good” cholesterol), triglycerides and other health markers (3, 4).”
Again and again we notice, that maybe, just maybe, eating most of our calories from carbohydrates, the way dietary guidelines recommend us by promoting all the “healthy” grains, eating all the carbs is not that good for us, in fact, it might be one of the biggest reasons of our accelerated epidemic of degenerative and metabolic diseases, anything starting from diabetes, heart and arteries problems, ending with cancer and all kinds of neurodegenerative conditions like Dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Eating high carbohydrate diet does not only make us fat, it also makes us sick, senile and makes our journey to the other worlds more painful and very often faster. And the only reason why some people still deny it, like global warming, is not the lack of evidence, but the lack of willingness to change the comforting habits, in this case eating habits, and all the grain/sugar industry giants, who want to make profits from food-like addictive products, not caring about consequences and innocently believing, not knowing better, that there is no harm in selling all this processed junk.
It’s becoming abnormal to be fit and lean.
It’s becoming normal to be sick and overweight to the point of obesity taking medications to balance poor lifestyle choices.
And that scares me…
As it turns out, the most googled diet of 2017, the ketogenic diet, low carb, high fat, moderate protein diet has been with us for centuries and all the principles of it were laid out decades ago! When there was no exogenous ketones, all the fancy supplements and keto cookies, fats and oils pouring from everywhere on everything we eat.
It was and is a simple intuitive natural approach to eating.
Lots of vegetables.
Meats, eggs and fish. The fattier, the better.
And that is pretty much it.
Fruits were a luxury available only once a year in season to fatten us up for winter.
Nuts and seeds were a rare find and hard to eat, before we had them at stores available 365/24/7 with a push of a handle pouring into a plastic bag from a huge container, modern day trees/nut dispensers, ready to eat de-shelled, pre-roasted and salted.
Oils and butters didn’t start pouring into our bulletproof coffees till much later.
The book.
The Banting Pocket Guide by Tim Noakes, Bernadine Douglas
The book has all the basic knowledge in a very concise form, everything you need to start and succeed on a LCHF (low carbohydrate high fat) diet. Everything from what this LCHF, or banting, or ketogenic diet, is all about — what foods to eat, how much of it is a normal amount, why you can’t eat unlimited fats and how much protein and what kind you actually need. The book educates us about smart label reading and about grocery shopping, what meats and vegetables are great and what are not so great, how many carbohydrates and of what kind you personally can afford to eat with your health history, your goals, your metabolism. It tells you all you need to know about sweeteners and other ingredients, that you can eat, or that should be off your consumption list forever, like a poison. The book has very simple meal plans for people with more difficult metabolic conditions and for people who are more active and carbohydrate tolerant. Meal plans come with simple easy-to-make recipes.
If I were to start banting, ketogenic diet, LCHF diet — that’s the book I’d want.
It’s simple. It’s all you need to know to understand the diet, why it works and how, what you got to do to succeed with the lifestyle in your situation.
You know, they say, there is no diet that fits all, right?
And there is no exact meal plan, exact schedule, exact food list, that works across the board for everyone. I agree.
But I also agree, that we are humans, we are one type of species and some general principles work for every human being.
I am yet to see the person for whom individually designed low carbohydrate high fat healthy diet does not cause better looks, better health, better performance, mental and physical.
I’ve been dedicated to the lifestyle, learning more about it, about dos and don’ts, trying, experimenting. The deeper, the more I get into it, the more great, fascinating things I learn and experience.
Here are some practical tips from the book. 5 more from me personally in the video.
Get the book. Use it. It will transform you.
The Banting Pocket Guide by Tim Noakes, Bernadine Douglas
It’s an amazing guide to ketogenic, keto, low carb high fat lifestyle! The best I’ve found so far.
