You may be wondering how a couple of physicians who specialize in weight loss in a relatively small city in Middle America devised a nutritional program that works as well as this one does, while most of the scientists in the major universities are headed off in the opposite direction, puzzling over why their success with low-fat diet plans has been so minimal.  In a nutshell, we lucked out.  We lucked out because that's how science works.  Science progresses because people continue to question why.  Researchers propose hypotheses based on their understanding of the natural world and then test them--and most of the time these theories blow up in their faces.  The lucky ones stumble onto the hypotheses that turn out to be valid.  But of course there's more than luck involved because as Louis Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind," and in our case our minds were prepared by many years of clinical practice with patients suffering all the illnesses that are heir to disordered insulin metabolism as well as by our unique combination of medical interests.  Mike is a collector of diet books and old medical texts and has a strong interest in paleopathology and biochemistry; Mary Dan is interested in anthropology and has published a book on eating disorders and the deranged metabolic status of eating-disordered patients.

We have a copy of the earliest diet book ever to sweep the nation, Banting's Letter on Corpulence, first printed in the middle 1800s.  This restricted-carbohydrate diet worked like a charm for Banting and, if sales were any indication, many others.  It has always intrigued us because it completely ...