Trendy diets tend to have names, like keto or south beach. And some of them, like the Atkins diet, are named after the person who popularized them, usually by writing a book. One of the trendiest recommendations of recent diets is avoidance of carbohydrates. All this — low carbs, fashionable diets promoted by books, diets with names — is pretty recent, of course.
Or is it? Have a look at this quotation from 1865: “If he is..gouty, obese, and nervous, we strongly recommend him to bant.” To “bant,” in the 1800s, was to follow the Banting Diet. Stop me if you’ve heard anything like this before, but it was a fashionable diet that recommended avoiding carbohydrates, and was named after William Banting, who wrote a book popularizing it. A century and a half ago.
As the story goes, Banting was a well-known London cabinetmaker who also built the kind of coffins used for people like Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. To move in those circles you have to be a good egg; a stout fellow. And Banting was indeed both egg-shaped and stout. No diet or exercise seemed to help him shed his extra pounds. Then he went to a doctor, who recommended that he avoid eating carbohydrates (as they were understood at the time, anyway). It worked! Banting was so enthusiastic that he wrote a book (a very short book; more of a pamphlet) about the diet called “Letter on Corpulence.” Over 60,000 copies were sold and given away — Banting donated all the profits to charity.
The diet caught on, and in 1860s London there were lots of people “banting.” Banting himself wasn’t out to build a dieting company, so he didn’t take out a trademark or even copyright. As a result, it wasn’t long before the word “bant” meant any diet at all, not just the one in his pamphlet. “Bant” has almost disappeared in English, but reportedly “bant” still means “diet” in Swedish.
