Welcome to the Doctor Burg healthy ketone intermittent fasting podcast.

Now your host, the man taking your health to a whole new level, Doctor Eric Burg.

So when did the ketogenic diet actually start?

Now in the 1920s they used the ketogenic diet for epilepsy, but epilepsy was also treated

with ketones, I think unknowingly, back in 500 BC because they found if you restricted

the diet and you just didn't feed patients with epilepsy, their epilepsy would go away.

And then there's doctors in the 20s which found that you could mimic fasting by restricting

carbohydrates.

Okay.

So because of ketones, obviously, but in the late 1800s before that, there was a man

by the name of William Banting, who was pretty wealthy and he was overweight and he discovered

that if you restrict carbohydrates, you can lose weight.

And so he wrote this little booklet called a letter of corpulence.

Corpulence means the state of being obese or fat.

Okay.

And this was back in 1863 and he wanted to get the word out.

So he basically gave this book out for free until it became a best seller and then he

started a charge for it just to cover his expenses.

But in this book, he talked about getting rid of breads, sugar, potatoes and eating meat,

vegetables, fish, eating mutton, which is sheep over two years old.

And he recommended eating kidneys as an organ meat, which is actually very, very healthy.

But of course, it wasn't perfect keto because his diet also consisted of a little bit

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