This week I got my hands on a little book published in 1965, called The Low Carbohydrate Diet, - a revised edition of a book originally called "The Airforce Diet".

It contains a brief history of low carb (i.e., tells the William Banting story) has food composition tables (no APPS in those days), 30 days worth of meal plans (some even use bread, but no snacks or what we call discretionary calories from flour-substituted muffins or bliss-ball-like fodder) and 30 days worth of simple recipes. All this for $2-75.

The back blurb says: The Low Carbohydrate Diet is the diet that has revolutionised the whole approach to weight reduction. Here is the whole story of the programme that thousands of weight watchers have used painlessly, safely and successfully.

It starts with this:
Chapter 1: THE DIET THAT SPREAD UNDERGROUND
"Some months ago in America, chronic weight-watchers became aware of a strange stirring in the world of nutrition . . .rumours of a diet which was achieving exciting results for people who had never before managed to get their weight problem under control.
Perhaps because it was habitually referred to as the 'Air Force' diet, without any official air force sanction, the new formula spread in a curiously underground fashion. It is now legend that copies of the diet were passed from friend to friend and run off on office Mimeograph machines..." and so it goes on...

It does makes me wonder where the world would be health wise if certain key events didn't take place to bring us our current food supply and dietary guidance system. In a spiritual sense it also makes me wonder if there was a smug entity sitting back watching to see how it was all to be destroyed, only to come full circle in the same underground (this time on the underground web) fashion today. What a shame that we had to get it wrong for so long, before we could work towards trying to get it right again!