135 Years Ago, A Physician Warned That Flour Makes People Fat. Nathaniel Edward Yorke-Davies treated obesity with meat and vegetables instead of starch...
In 1889, long before calorie-counting apps, diet shakes, or GLP-1 drugs, a British physician named Nathaniel Edward Yorke-Davies was treating obesity in a completely different way.
His approach would sound strangely familiar today.
Instead of cutting calories, he targeted something else entirely.
Carbohydrates.
Yorke-Davies believed the real problem behind weight gain was the heavy consumption of flour foods, starches, and sugar. In his clinical practice, he saw the same pattern again and again. Patients eating bread, sweets, and refined grains gained weight easily and struggled to lose it.
So he changed the diet.
Less flour.
Less sugar.
More meat.
More real food.
The results were striking enough that his work spread beyond ordinary patients.
One of the people he treated was President William Howard Taft, who was famously battling obesity during his time in office.
Yorke-Davies documented his ideas in a book called “Foods for the Fat: A Treatise on Corpulency.”
Published in 1889.
That date matters.
Because it reminds us that the conversation about carbohydrates and weight gain is not new. Doctors were already questioning the role of refined starch and sugar more than a century ago.
What has changed is not the biology.
What has changed is how often the idea gets rediscovered.
History has a strange habit of repeating itself in nutrition.
And every once in a while, an old book quietly reminds us that some of these debates started a very long time ago.
Mike Collins