• Guest - w'd love to know what you think about the forum! Take the 2025 Survey »

Vintage diets for diabetics?

MikeTurin

Well-Known Member
Messages
564
Location
Turin, Italy
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Tablets (oral)
I'have a curiosity, I've tried to search how the diets for the diabetics were made before the guidelines of the '80 the one that started to advise the general population to eat low fat and high carb.
From what I have inferred these older diets were reduced carb ones, but from a cursory search engine query I didn't find anything.
If one of the old guys or gals has a typewritten a carbon copied diet from the '70, and likes to scan and publis it I think we get a really interesting thing to read....
 
Have a look for the Banting Diet.

There is quite a lot of info on the web about it, and it really is the first Low Carb Fad Diet. lol.
Except time is now proving that there was nothing faddish about it at all.
 
Low carb diets have a very long history stretching back before insulin was available. This 1917 cookbook is sometimes cited. This is of limited use today because it often uses products such as various low carb flours that were commercially available at the time but are not today. A lot of the principles though still hold.

There were various short-lived ineffectual 'fad' diets around the same time, mainly based around starches. Sound familiar ... ?
 
MikeTurin said:
From what I have inferred these older diets were reduced carb ones, but from a cursory search engine query I didn't find anything.
Click to expand...

Found the answer quite quick Mike, according to the following the diet was made of 40% carbs, 40% fat and 20% protein:

In the first half of the 20th century, Elliot P. Joslin and others recommended a diet composed of 40 percent of caloric intake from carbohydrates, 40 percent from fat, and 20 percent from protein to all patients with diabetes. This dietary composition was widely accepted by health care professionals as the standard diabetes diet until the late 1970s when a concern was raised about the increased incidence of coronary artery disease among patients with diabetes, which was partially blamed on the excess calories from fat sources.

This concern urged the medical community to agree on reducing fat intake to around 30 percent of the total daily caloric consumption. The recommended decrease in fat intake required a compensatory increase in either carbohydrate or protein intake as percentage of total calories.

http://blog.joslin.org/2014/06/a-brief-history-of-the-diabetes-diet/
 
Cookery and Household Management
Printed 1936

Diabetes

Those suffering from this ailment require carefully to avoid all foods containing sugar and starch. The following Must be avoided:
Milk, sugar, flour, cornflour, oatmeal, rice, sago, macaroni, the various pulse foods, fruits containing a high percentage of sugar, potatoes, beets, carrots, peas, parsnips, broad beans, spanish onions.

The following are allowed:
meat, soups, fish, poultry, game and meat of all kinds. Also eggs, butter, cream, cheese, certain vegetables. Light dry wines. Weak unsweetened spirits. Tea, coffee and cocoa which may be sweetened with saccharine. There may be plentiful use of butter, cream, fat and oils if the digestion will allow.
 
The cookbook I referred to earlier gives some of Joslin's dietary tables.
 
Remember 100 years ago food was not as plentiful as it is now. The big-wigs in the British Army complained about the poor health of new conscripts in 1916, the cause was mostly down to poor diet
 
Interesting in the cookbook that @Jay-Marc linked that coconut is forbidden but shortening and vegetable oils allowed. Other than that it is pretty much the standard LCHF and looks much like the Atkins diet.
 
@chalup It also recommends a full range of offals plus such eating such things as ears and feet. Puts it in the paelo category there. Mind you these were much more commonly eaten in general back then.

Also included in the fish are frogs' legs ...
 


Thank you so much for the link to this book... its amazing..

The detail and preparation of food was remarkable!!

Spinach.. we washed and cut off the stem bits for me...and used to fry in butter... (now just add to smoothies).. but the spinach cooking in this book involved so much!!

I am going to give some of these ways of cooking a go for hubby
Just unsure about all the added salt... and the saccharin can easily be swopped.

Brilliant reading... thank you

40g max carbs and an abstinence day mentioned..absolutely fascinating.. almost 100 years on and almond flour is being used more....(by some)..
 
Last edited:
Thank you for the link. It's interesting for the reversal of the approach from the diet suggested nowadays.
Being a century old book reflects the food eaten and available on that days. The first household fridge was marketed in 1911 , but only after WW2 its widespread diffusion started. I suppose the milk raw and unprocessed one, quite different from the milk of nowadays or the one in the seventies.

I suppose that replicating some of these recipe can result on a quite different result.
 
MikeTurin said:
I suppose that replicating some of these recipe can result on a quite different result.
Click to expand...
Old recipes are always hard to follow even of all the ingredients are still around. Details are skipped and what a 'very moderate oven' really was is not completely clear.

There have been fairly recent commercial food technology tests using aleurone-rich flour, which I guess is likely to be similar to the 'aleuronat flour'. It is about 60% of the carbs of ordinary wheat flour. No sign of anyone marketing anything yet.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn More.…