Tapeworms and Other Diet Programs of the Past

How badly do you want to lose weight? Would you knowingly ingest a parasite? Agree to live on wine only? Or would you "Reach for a Lucky" cigarette?

The history of dieting is rich and varied, with many more quack cures than truly efficacious treatments. Here's a short outline of the highlights.

c. 1550 BC: The Ebers Papyrus, the world's oldest surviving medical document, recommends a wheatgerm and okra diet for diabetics.

c. 1070 AD: William the Conqueror, unable to sit on his horse due to his weight, eschewed food in favor of wine. There is no record of how well his diet worked, but he died in a fall from his horse in 1087 during the Siege of Nantes. Reportedly, his body decayed so fast that the stench drove mourners from the cathedral - making one wonder how good alcohol really is at preserving your body. At least when ingested.

c. 1510 AD: Luigi Cornaro, near death at age 40, modifies his eating habits with the first caloric restriction diet: 12 ounces of solid food and 14 ounces of wine daily. Later, his daily food intake was reduced to a single egg daily - and the wine, of course. He wrote several treatises on dieting, the latest at the age of 95. He died aged 98.

1727 AD : Thomas Short recommends that overweight people move to dry climates because, he says, most of them live near swamps.

The late 1700s AD: Social commentators begin to observe rising obesity in Europe and the new United States. Prior to this time, obesity was a rarity and a sign of affluence; Rubinesque women were worshipped as beauties, and a fat man was seen as happy.

1829 AD: Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister in New Jersey, preaches the morality of vegetarianism and whole grains. A year later, he created the Graham cracker, and advocated followers swear off alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco. (Wonder if that was where the Mormons got it?). Diet should be, he said, bland.

1857 AD: Dr. Gustav Zander invents the Zander, a piece of exercise equipment that tries to jiggle your weight off with a special belt. These were kept in Zander Rooms in his spas. Babe Ruth used it in training films. And my mother had one when I was a little girl.

1862 AD: William Banting, a London undertaker, adopted the first Atkins-style diet composed of high proteins, high fats, and a few vegetables his doctor recommended. After his brilliant success over a year, he published the first dieting bestseller, selling 58,000 copies of his Letter on Corpulence. This pamphlet documented his diet and success in losing weight because he "abstained from starch and saccharine matter." For years, what we know today as dieting was called "Banting."

The late 1800s AD: The first recorded cases of anorexia appear among wealthy Victorian young ladies.

1890s AD: Advertisements for the Tapeworm Diet appear; the treatment is the head of a tapeworm, to be swallowed by the woman (or man, but usually woman) who wanted to lose weight. The real kicker? There are still people today who sell this diet.

1900 AD: Insurance companies declare that there is a connection between being fat and dying younger. Treatments for losing weight from animal thyroid extracts to useless herbals to amphetamines spring up everywhere. This was the beginning of both the Diet Industry - and Hollywood Glamour.

1903 AD: In a sign of the times, the Fat Man's Club in Connecticut closes its doors, ending a century of corpulent tradition. Also, famously-fat President William Howard Taft got stuck in his oversized bathtub and swore to diet. He didn't.

1903 AD: Horace Fletcher, a San Francisco art dealer, became known as the Great Masticator because he habitually chewed his bites 32 times - and then spit out the remains. His reason? He'd been denied health insurance because he was too fat. He thought that you could absorb the nutrients without swallowing the food, and thus the matter would not make you gain weight. Many others thought so too; his books were very popular, and he was worshipped by novelist Henry James and oil tycoon J.D. Rockefeller. John Harvey Kellogg, founder of the cereal company, was heavily influenced by Fletcher as well.

c. 1920 AD: Lulu Hunt Peters, an American doctor, introduces the idea of calorie counting to the dieting world. Her interest is more in morality than health or appearance; to her, the evidence of overeating was morally abhorrent and thinness was a virtue. Her book, Diet and Health, With Key to the Calories, sold over 2 million copies and hyped a diet including only 1200 calories daily.

1925 AD: Lucky Strikes cigarettes exhorts everyone to "reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet." They were right; smoking does help you lose weight. It also gives you lung cancer and does many other nasty things, proving that diets aren't all good.

1928 AD: Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an explorer who lived with the Inuit for a period, preaches the positive effects of an all meat and fat diet - another Atkins precursor.

1930s AD: Dr. William Hay presents the Hay Diet, stating that proteins and starches should never be combined in a meal. Fruit, meat, and dairy should be consumed at one meal, and bread and potatoes at a different one. He also recommended daily enemas. So no sandwiches, and no fun.

At the same time, Slimming Soap was invented. Just wash that fat away with our several varieties like Fatoff or La Mar Reducing Soap! No diet, no exercise, just cleanliness.

1935 AD: Dinitrophenol was touted as a diet pill because it raised the body's metabolism. It worked. It was also used in manufacturing dyes, insecticide, and explosives. After only three years, several cases of blindness and sudden death forced it off the market. Today it's still used by some athletes to get quick weight loss - giving new meaning to the term "dumb jock."

1954 AD: The Tapeworm Diet rears its ugly head again, this time in rumors that Maria Callas used it to lose 65 pounds. She didn't. Her tapeworm came the old fashioned way, through steak and liver tartar. Mmm, raw meat - and parasites.

1961 AD: Obstetrician (therefore expert on fast weight loss) Dr. Herman Taller sold safflower oil capsules to support his Calories Don't Count Diet. The basic idea: you ate his recommended high-protein diet - and then consumed 3 ounces of polyunsaturated vegetable oil (!) in the form of his pills. After complaints of fraud and diarrhea, he was convicted of mail fraud.

1964 AD: There had to be one. Robert Cameron began The Drinking Man's Diet, recommending gin and vodka as low-carb alcoholic indulgences. You still had to count calories, and alcohol still counted. Sigh.

1980s AD: A variety of different crazy diets abound: the Vision-Dieter, which used special glasses to make food look unappealing; the Mini Fork System, helping dieters take smaller bites; the Breatharians, who used yoga to avoid eating and thought you could live on air.

1997 AD: Fen-Phen is withdrawn from the market by the FDA after widespread reports of illness, heart disease, and death related to its use. The "miracle drug" took off the weight - and then killed.

2007 AD: Boxes of Alli fly off the shelves as the first over-the-counter diet remedy approved as such by the FDA is released to the public. This is despite the fact that, yes, you still have to follow a diet, and yes, you still have to exercise. Even the added bonus of risking acute and uncontrollable diarrhea did not deter desperate dieters. The question is still out as to whether Depends sales went up the same week.

So there you have it - 3500 years of diet remedies. Some work, some don't. Some will kill you - which is, admittedly, a sure way of losing weight. But the one common thread among the diets that work: you have to modify your eating, and you have to modify it forever. There is no quick fix.