Low carb diabetic cooking 100 years ago

[Totto]

https://archive.org/stream/diabeticcookeryr00oppeiala#page/2/mode/2up

Diabetic cookery from 1917. Rejoice, half of it is puddings, cakes, ice cream and such.

An interesting read. Note that butter is to be served with every meal.

 

[lovinglife]

Fascinating book, great find,I love old cook books and recipes, I don't go really low carb stick to about 90g a day but liked some of the recipes although you're right there's a LOT of sweet stuff.
I like the idea of wine soupThe coffee jelly is a novel idea, wonder if Andy has seen this.

It seems like a good basic book for anyone these days who is trying to get to grips with low carbing, worth a read

 

[tonyS54]

In those days they didn't fear fat and recognised the importance of a low carb diet for diabetics.

Were did it all go wrong

 

[CollieBoy]

we fell in love with "the pill will fix all" to the exclusion of common sense!

 

[Yorksman]

My grandfather was 12 in 1912. At that time, schoolkids worked half a day in the mill and had half a day at school, until they were 14, when they worked full time. The shift alternated, one week it would be school first, and then the mill and the following week it was the other way around.

He'd get up at 4.30 get washed and walk with his Dad to the pub where he and his mates all had breakfast, coffee, pickled eggs, ham sandwiches, beer etc. The mill horn would go and they'd all start work at 6am. One of the young lad's duties was to take the milk churn to the pub and get it filled with beer for the cotton workers to drink, a practice which was stopped by Lloyd George, in 1916. Grandad finished at 12 midday and had to start school at 1pm. The teacher said he "felt sorry for the poor buggers, they're all dead beat". After school, he walk 2 miles to the allotments north of Manchester and get the cart and donkey ready and set off on his round, collecting the potato peelings from the fish and chip shops which were to be used for feeding the pigs back at the allotment. When he got back, he had to tend to the donkey, put the car away and then light a fire to boil up the potato peelings to sterilise them. When they were cool, he could feed the pigs. Then he'd walk the two miles back home and have something to eat and go to bed.

My wife's grandfather used to tell how he would walk, with his friends, over the moors from Huddersfield to Oldham, along with a couple of thousand of others, to watch the football match. Then they'd all walk back. An old bloke I knew used to tell me that, as a lad, hee would accompany his mother as they walked from a village near Barnsley, every Saturday, to Huddersfield, because they had better shops there. They spent the day shopping and then carried all the bags back. People simply required more food for energy in those days.

Here's a clip of a different, but similar, mill scene from 1900.

 

[smartlady]

The cook all veg for at least 30 mins made me shudder lol. Along with vegetables best finely chopped or pureed. ugh lol

Smartie xx

 

[douglas99]

My grandfather was 12 in 1912. At that time, schoolkids worked half a day in the mill and had half a day at school, until they were 14, when they worked full time. The shift alternated, one week it would be school first, and then the mill and the following week it was the other way around.

He'd get up at 4.30 get washed and walk with his Dad to the pub where he and his mates all had breakfast, coffee, pickled eggs, ham sandwiches, beer etc. The mill horn would go and they'd all start work at 6am. One of the young lad's duties was to take the milk churn to the pub and get it filled with beer for the cotton workers to drink, a practice which was stopped by Lloyd George, in 1916. Grandad finished at 12 midday and had to start school at 1pm. The teacher said he "felt sorry for the poor buggers, they're all dead beat". After school, he walk 2 miles to the allotments north of Manchester and get the cart and donkey ready and set off on his round, collecting the potato peelings from the fish and chip shops which were to be used for feeding the pigs back at the allotment. When he got back, he had to tend to the donkey, put the car away and then light a fire to boil up the potato peelings to sterilise them. When they were cool, he could feed the pigs. Then he'd walk the two miles back home and have something to eat and go to bed.

My wife's grandfather used to tell how he would walk, with his friends, over the moors from Huddersfield to Oldham, along with a couple of thousand of others, to watch the football match. Then they'd all walk back. An old bloke I knew used to tell me that, as a lad, hee would accompany his mother as they walked from a village near Barnsley, every Saturday, to Huddersfield, because they had better shops there. They spent the day shopping and then carried all the bags back. People simply required more food for energy in those days.

Here's a clip of a different, but similar, mill scene from 1900.

You have to wonder who that book was written for in 1917.
A select few no doubt.
Butter, cream, saccharin, almond flour, cocoa, coffee essence, crystallose, the book even comes with instructions where to send "the man" to to buy the items.
While the workers survived on potatoes.
Until the great depression of the next decade, then even the potatoes had gone.

 

[Yorksman]

I have read that at the end of the 1800s, the working classes who were in jobs were better nourished than the lower aspiring middle classes. The workers drank beer and ate brown bread. In those days, both were highly nutritious. The lower end of the middle classes who aspired to better things did things like drink tea and eat white bread, but couldn't afford much else. It wasn't nutritious enough. My gt grandfather who owned the allotment had grown up on a farm, his father had been a blacksmith and his mother was a poultry maid for one of the mill owners. They were used to growing and preserving foods. But, it took up the entire day.

Grandad lied about his age and joined up in 1916.

 

[douglas99]

That was it though, work all day, then down the allotment. And take the kids as soon as they could work, at 10 or 12. My grandparents entire day was get up, work, go to bed, get up work. But I agree, nothing was wasted, couldn't afford to. But bread was a staple, potatoes where a good allotment crop, meat was scarce, and if you had an animal, if you killed it, you ate everything. But there were a lot of carbs in the day, bread, pastry, potatoes, if there wasn't any thing else.

 

[xyzzy]

Page 147 is interesting as it quite happily advocates a 40g per day regime! Remember at the time the book was written it would have been the diet for T1 & T2 as insulin therapy wasn't invented until the mid 1920's

Low and very low carb regimes continued as the recommended norm for T2 until 1954 when without any scientific evidence the ADA abandoned LC in favour of recommending a 40% carb regime.

 

[phoenix]

Page 147 is interesting as it quite happily advocates a 40g per day regime! Remember at the time the book was written it would have been the diet for T1 & T2 as insulin therapy wasn't invented until the mid 1920's

.

It didn't work though for T1s nor for a lot of the possible T2s. Remember they will not have been diagnosed at the early point they are today and indeed even when they were diagnosed the monitoring was mostly through glucose in the urine , normally only present if the level is above about 10mmol/l
In an attempt to get improved results, Frederick Allen introduced the starvation diet "We literally starved the child and adult with the faint hope that something new in treatment would appear...It was no fun to starve a child to let him live" Elliott Joslin , A few lucky ones did survive until insulin was introduced but not many. Some died as a result of inanition, a synonym for starvation.
Here's how they did it, complete with recipes.
THE
STARVATION TREATMENT
OF DIABETES
With a Series of Graduated Diets
used at the
MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26058/26058-h/26058-h.htm
The short term case studies for the adults look quite promising in this book, the children less so. The longer term figures, so far as they are available continue to show high mortality rates.
Why were "starvation diets" promoted for diabetes in the pre-insulin period?
Allan Mazur
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3062586/#!po=64.8148

 

[xyzzy]

It didn't work though for T1s nor for a lot of the possible T2s. Remember they will not have been diagnosed at the early point they are today and indeed even when they were diagnosed the monitoring was mostly through glucose in the urine , normally only present if the level is above about 10mmol/l
In an attempt to get improved results, Frederick Allen introduced the starvation diet "We literally starved the child and adult with the faint hope that something new in treatment would appear...It was no fun to starve a child to let him live" Elliott Joslin , A few lucky ones did survive until insulin was introduced but not many. Some died as a result of inanition, a synonym for starvation.
Here's how they did it, complete with recipes.
THE
STARVATION TREATMENT
OF DIABETES
With a Series of Graduated Diets
used at the
MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26058/26058-h/26058-h.htm
The short term case studies for the adults look quite promising in this book, the children less so. The longer term figures, so far as they are available continue to show high mortality rates.
Why were "starvation diets" promoted for diabetes in the pre-insulin period?
Allan Mazur
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3062586/#!po=64.8148

Yes I would guess for any insulin dependent diabetic without insulin vlc could only possibly ever be marginally less damaging than any other regime.

The book however is advocating anything but a starvation diet. If you read carefully around the pages I mentioned it shows how to get 2500 calories from a 40g regime. Maybe it was developed as a way of countering the starvation regime ?

Sent from the Diabetes Forum App

 

[phoenix]

I think it's hard to know what happened in 'normal' cases. Allen was linked to well known hospitals and wrote papers. All the doctors mentioned in the history books are the famous ones, not the local GPs. At the end of the 19thC/ beginning of the 20th century there was a lot of controversy. The French doctor Bourchadat noticed that some of his diabetic patients became healthier during the Siege of Paris. He advised fast days and exercise. Von Noorden found that oatmeal and butter seemed to stop acidosis so developed a diet containing oatmeal and milk. Naunyn was the pre-eminent advocate of the low carb diet. At the Joslin institute his diet is listed as being used pre Allen.
This made me laugh plus ça change.....

Various dietary schools developed and by the beginning of the 20th century their respective adherents were embroiled in heated controversies reflecting their dogmatism, contradiction and confusion. Naunyn, championed carbohydrate-free diets, while those on the other extreme championed high-carbohydrate diets variously consisting of milk, oatmeal and other cereals and potatoes……..
By the early part of the 20th century, diet partisanship was so intense that some physicians were arguing about the relative merits of different oatmeal and the various ways of cooking them

Clinical Diabetes Mellitus: A Problem-oriented Approach
edited by John K. Davidson

 

[Totto]

But the Diabetic cookery book isn't about starving, it is about eating well. Of course you will want to eat very few carbs if if you are diabetic and have no other treatment.

In fact, you may want to eat very few carbs even if there are alternatives in treatment.

 

[tonyS54]

Published in 1958 "Eat Fat And Grow Slim" was a slimmers guide to a high fat low carb diet, it's an easy read and covers many of the contentious issues over LC that we see today.

Quick guide
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/fat/

Full book
http://doczine.com/bigdata/2/1367179203_9e0b9b3b62/eat_fat.pdf

 

[AtkinsMo]

My father was born in 1922 and diagnosed T1 sometime pre 1939 (he couldn't serve in the forces) but he hid his condition and worked as a face worker in the coal mines till about 1965. He worked very hard on a 3 shift pattern.

I distinctly remember food, in our house, being referred to as 'Greens, Reds and Blacks' , he had the same sorts of quantities every day. He regarded it as a huge breakthrough that gave him back his life, when he was able to have only 1 injection a day. We never had desserts, when my brother was also diagnosed T1 at 14 I wasn't even allowed sweets as a treat. When bg machines came in he kept his blood sugar very tight, he went on long walks and had a static bicycle in inclement weather. Prior to that he kept his urine glucose at 'green precip' - don't know what that meant, but I remember it well, I was intrigued with it as a child, like a chemistry set.

He lived to the grand old age of 86, diabetes got him in the end. He was on a coach trip to Blackpool, in his 80s, when he fell asleep. He was a widow by then. Nobody thought it was a problem, an elderly gentleman having a nap, but when they tried to wake him he was in a hypo. The ambulance was sent for, glucagon dispensed, but, typically, he refused to go to A&E and set off running to catch his pals. He had a Cardiac Arrest outside Blackpool Pleasure Beach, the First Aiders got him back but the Anoxia robbed him of his memory and his independence. Managing his diabetes became a nightmare, he couldn't remember injecting and left alone would repeatedly inject himself. He lost all perspective of time, if he woke up at 3am he would start cooking bacon and eggs. With 3 teenage children, the first about to go to Uni and needing financial support, and a full time job, there was no alternative but him to go into care, where he was fed pizza and chips, pies, pasties, desserts. He developed 'diabetic side effects' remarkably quickly - he had none whatsoever before.

His health rapidly deteriorated, I think, in the end, his GP decided not to treat him / admit him for a hypo. I didn't challenge it at the time because his quality of life was simply dreadful and he would not have thanked me for dragging him back to life. But he had a good 80 years, 63 of them diabetic and with no short term memory the realities of his day to day life for the last couple of years distressed him less than me.

 

[Brunneria]

My father was born in 1922 and diagnosed T1 sometime pre 1939 (he couldn't serve in the forces) but he hid his condition and worked as a face worker in the coal mines till about 1965. He worked very hard on a 3 shift pattern.

I distinctly remember food, in our house, being referred to as 'Greens, Reds and Blacks' , he had the same sorts of quantities every day. He regarded it as a huge breakthrough that gave him back his life, when he was able to have only 1 injection a day. We never had desserts, when my brother was also diagnosed T1 at 14 I wasn't even allowed sweets as a treat. When bg machines came in he kept his blood sugar very tight, he went on long walks and had a static bicycle in inclement weather. Prior to that he kept his urine glucose at 'green precip' - don't know what that meant, but I remember it well, I was intrigued with it as a child, like a chemistry set.

He lived to the grand old age of 86, diabetes got him in the end. He was on a coach trip to Blackpool, in his 80s, when he fell asleep. He was a widow by then. Nobody thought it was a problem, an elderly gentleman having a nap, but when they tried to wake him he was in a hypo. The ambulance was sent for, glucagon dispensed, but, typically, he refused to go to A&E and set off running to catch his pals. He had a Cardiac Arrest outside Blackpool Pleasure Beach, the First Aiders got him back but the Anoxia robbed him of his memory and his independence. Managing his diabetes became a nightmare, he couldn't remember injecting and left alone would repeatedly inject himself. He lost all perspective of time, if he woke up at 3am he would start cooking bacon and eggs. With 3 teenage children, the first about to go to Uni and needing financial support, and a full time job, there was no alternative but him to go into care, where he was fed pizza and chips, pies, pasties, desserts. He developed 'diabetic side effects' remarkably quickly - he had none whatsoever before.

His health rapidly deteriorated, I think, in the end, his GP decided not to treat him / admit him for a hypo. I didn't challenge it at the time because his quality of life was simply dreadful and he would not have thanked me for dragging him back to life. But he had a good 80 years, 63 of them diabetic and with no short term memory the realities of his day to day life for the last couple of years distressed him less than me.

Awesome post. Thank you.