Taste of Life: How Banting diet became a measure of human worth

The legacy of Banting in India serves as a reminder that diets are rarely just about health. They are enduring exercises in power that continue to shape how society measures human worth

The language and concepts used to describe the physical body are inherently shaped by cultural forces. It is difficult to say whether the audience of some three hundred listeners sitting before Surgeon-Major Joshua Duke of the 3rd Punjab Cavalry was aware of this when he arrived in Poona in the summer of 1886 and delivered a lecture on the Banting diet or Bantigism. However, this lecture introduced most of them to the vocabulary related to the body, weight-loss diets, and obesity.

William Banting, who was 200 pounds, was obese and suffered from immense ill health due to his weight. He lost 46 pounds with a strict low-carbohydrate diet. (WIKIMEDIA)

The origins of this vocabulary trace back to William Banting, a London undertaker and funeral director to the British Royal Household. Banting was obese and suffered from immense ill health due to his weight. After several unsuccessful fasts, diets, spa treatments, and exercise regimes, he met Dr William Harvey, a Soho physician who prescribed him a strict low-carbohydrate diet.

Within a year, Banting shed 46 pounds, proudly declaring himself cured of the “insidious creeping enemy” of excess weight. Believing it was his life’s calling to assist others struggling with obesity, he published a brief autobiographical account of his journey titled “A Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public”. The pamphlet became an immediate sensation, igniting a widespread weight-loss craze that endured for decades. Its cultural impact was so profound that his surname entered the dictionary as a verb, with “to bant” becoming the standard term for treating obesity by eliminating sugars and starches. Harvey, who had originally planned the diet, was forgotten. His name was never associated with the diet.

Banting’s original diet aligned with existing British prejudices regarding food. It demanded a high intake of expensive proteins, like meat, while strictly forbidding cheap carbohydrates such as sugar, starches, and grains.

The British used this dietary framework to pathologise the traditional Indian diet. The carbohydrate-heavy meals of the Indian population, relying on rice, wheat, lentils, and ghee, were suddenly framed not just as different, but as medically and scientifically “inferior” and “fattening.” The British colonisers, who maintained their meat-heavy diets even in the sweltering Indian heat, held themselves up as the pinnacle of Banting-approved, systematic eating.

Bantingism worked both as a model of disciplined eating for aspiring Indian elites and as an instrument of imperial influence. Along with Duke’s efforts, it was introduced to India through British administrative and military networks, especially via East India Company institutions. Evangelical organisations, too, clung to Bantingism to assert their superior moral and physical authority.

However, Duke was instrumental in transforming Banting’s dietary principles into a strategic weapon for British imperial expansion. Writing in the decades following the 1857 Mutiny, his work drew a direct correlation between physical discipline and political authority.

Duke promoted the Banting method out of what he saw as the “falling standards of the British Army, and men, in general.” He sharply criticised “foreign influences,” arguing that the British had grown too soft. Pointing to this supposed decline, he wrote in his book, “So gentle and good have we become that, as many think, the result of moral cowardice, flogging is considered now unnecessary in our army and navy.” Convinced that “effeminacy, unmanliness, and perhaps unwomanliness were represented by the Esthete and Estheticism,” he presented strict adherence to Banting’s diet not merely as a matter of health, but as a pressing patriotic duty.

During the early 1800s, British society maintained a complex, often contradictory relationship with body size. Rather than viewing weight as a simple binary of healthy or unhealthy, Victorians evaluated bodies on a nuanced spectrum that ranged from gauntness and leanness to plumpness and corpulence. A voluptuous, full figure was not only the pinnacle of women’s fashion but was actively endorsed by medical professionals as a sign of robust vitality. Yet, this celebration of “plumpness” sharply contrasted with a mounting cultural dread of excessive “corpulence.” Consequently, the era was defined by a paradoxical tug-of-war where, even as doctors praised a fleshy physique, public neurosis surrounding overeating and diet was rapidly taking root, a shift clearly illustrated by the sudden popularity of Sylvester Graham’s strict vegetarian health crusade.

By the late nineteenth century, earlier positive views of fatness had faded. Influenced by a growing obsession with efficiency and scientific management, especially in the United States, weight loss and dietary control became social norms. Western societies increasingly moved from valuing plumpness to stigmatising it.

These ideas travelled to colonial India, where they merged with power and prejudice. Traditionally, a fuller body signified prosperity and access to food. However, the British ideal of “muscular Christianity” celebrated lean and active bodies. Fatness was often portrayed as a sign of poor self-control or “primitive” habits. British officials reinterpreted the bodies of wealthy Indians through a racial lens, linking corpulence to laziness, greed, and weakness. This fed into claims that Indians were unfit for self-rule.

Colonial doctors reinforced these attitudes by closely examining and criticising the lifestyles and diets of India’s urban elite.

In the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British sought to reform their armed forces and reinforce imperial authority through ideals of discipline and restraint. Duke tapped into this shift by promoting Bantingism as a model of English virtue built on strict dietary control. He advanced the image of a lean, highly disciplined administrator whose physical self-regulation marked him as fit to rule. The Banting diet, in his view, acted as a safeguard against any “cultural contagion” that might weaken European dominance.

Duke’s version of Bantingism also operated as a tool of colonial segregation, drawing sharp lines of belonging based on power and behaviour. His writing presented British readers with a stark choice: adopt rigorous dietary discipline to preserve imperial authority and remain within the “civilised world,” or give in to excess and be pushed down the colonial hierarchy alongside those portrayed as unfit to govern.

This turned the physical body into a literal battleground against contagion and incivility. The simple London weight-loss craze mutated into a profound psychological weapon, proving the British Empire sought to colonise not just the territory, but also the body and appetites of its subjects.

By equating thinness with moral superiority and fatness with degeneracy, Duke and others created a lasting legacy of physical prejudice. However, this aggressive policing of the Indian body eventually sparked a powerful counter-movement. Stung by constant accusations of effeminacy and weakness, Indian leaders realised that challenging British political dominance required reclaiming their own physical autonomy. This gave rise to a fierce wave of “muscular nationalism,” driving a widespread revival of traditional physical culture, wrestling, and yoga. The legacy of Banting in India serves as a reminder that diets are rarely just about health. They are enduring exercises in power that continue to shape how society measures human worth.

Chinmay Damle is a research scientist and food enthusiast. He writes here on Pune’s food culture. He can be contacted at chinmay.damle@gmail.com