Nothing is NEW :For those who think that Atkins was the first to give us "low carb" diets just imaging eating the diet that army surgeon John Rollo inflicted on his patient Captain Meredith in 1797!

 Nothing is NEW :
For those who think that Atkins was the first to give us "low carb" diets just imaging eating the diet that army surgeon John Rollo inflicted on his patient Captain Meredith in 1797!

I too feel this way

I have spent most of my working life looking after patients with, and researching, diabetes. It has been an absorbing journey. As the Birmingham physician John Malins wrote in his 1968 textbook:
"The more diabetic patients one sees the more difficult it becomes to present the simple picture that so many readers like. Diabetes is a disorder of such infinite variety that it becomes impossible to say that this always occurs or that never happens . . . today a diabetic clinic provides the widest clinical range of any specialty in medicine with metabolic, vascular, neurological and psychiatric problems outstanding. In addition there is a chance to enjoy some of the pleasures of general practice which arise from long acquaintance with many of the patients. The chance, all too frequent, to ease the last years of those whose health is slowly failing calls for all the resources of the general physician.4
The effects of diabetes are indeed highly variable, as the following examples show."

 a similar picture was seen among Asian Indians, where about 4 per cent of those in rural India were diabetic compared to 23 per cent of Indians living in Fiji or Leicester, England.

 A Victorian physician had even described diabetes as ‘one of the penalties of advanced civilization’


Although  For many many years we were taught  that EBERS papyrus is the  first mention of Diabetes it  is really debatable

The earliest description of what might be diabetes is in an Egyptian papyrus of 1500 bc. The entry consists of the single phrase ‘a medicine to drive away the passing of too much urine’.1 Frequency and retention with overflow are also mentioned, making it uncertain whether what is being described is an excessive volume of urine (polyuria) or  excessively frequent urination (frequency) as from infection or a bladder stone. The Hindu physician Sushruta, who is thought to have written in the sixth century bc, described a disease of honey urine. The diagnosis was made by tasting the urine or noting that ants congregated round it—the latter is still one of the commonest ways of diagnosing diabetes in Africa today. The disease was perceived by Sushruta to be most common in indolent, overweight, and gluttonous people and ran in families. Physical exercise and vegetables were the mainstays of treatment in the obese, while the lean, in whom the disease was regarded as more serious, were prescribed a nourishing diet

Robert Tattersal Diabetes__The_Biography