Vinegar and weight loss in women of eighteenth-century France: a lesson from the past.

This short note reports the eighteenth-century account of Mademoiselle Lapaneterie, a French woman who started drinking vinegar to lose weight and died one month later. The case, which was first published by Pierre Desault in 1733, has not yet been reported by present-day behavioural scholars. Similar reports about cases in 1776 are also presented, confirming that some women were using vinegar for weight loss. Those cases can be conceived as a lesson from the past for contemporary policies against the deceptive marketing of potentially hazardous weight-loss products.

The Fat Person on the Edgware Road Omnibus: Fat, Fashion, and Public Shaming in the British Long Eighteenth Century.

Dieting as a fashionable undertaking in the public sphere appears in the course of the long eighteenth century. It is part of a shift to an awareness of the public stigma of obesity and marks the rise of a dieting culture focused on psychological rather than a purely somatic phenomenon. It is coterminous with the redefinition of the "reasonable" (rational) person both in law as well as in the public sphere.Reasonableness comes to define the normal within a cult of the rational; obesity comes to mark that state beyond reasonableness. Such views led and lead to the potential for psychological difficulties that come to be the hallmark of modern dieting practice.

Hasday: tratamiento de la obesidad en el siglo X / Hasday: treatment of obesity in 10th century

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Corpulence and correspondence: President William H. Taft and the medical management of obesity.

This article analyzes the letters exchanged as part of the clinical weight management of President William H. Taft, one of the first public figures in U.S. history to be defined popularly in terms of his pathologic obesity. In 1905, Taft hired Dr. Nathaniel E. Yorke-Davies, an English diet expert, to supervise a weight-loss plan. Taft corresponded extensively with Yorke-Davies over the next 10 years, receiving and responding to courses of treatment via post. This correspondence is one of the few archival collections documenting physician and patient perspectives on the treatment of obesity, and it took place at the precise moment when obesity began to be framed as both a serious and medically manageable condition. This intimate clinical history of the 27th president and 10th chief justice of the Supreme Court offers a unique opportunity to examine in detail the history of the obesity experience in the United States, and it sheds light on the almost-timeless challenges of creating and maintaining long-term treatment courses for conditions like obesity.

Controlling caloric consumption: protocols for rodents and rhesus monkeys.

One approach for investigating biological aging is to compare control-fed animals with others restricted in calorie intake by 20% or more. Caloric restriction (CR) is the only intervention shown to extend the maximum lifespan of several invertebrates and vertebrates including spiders, fish, rats and mice. The capacity of CR to retard aging in nonhuman primates is now being explored. The rodent studies show that CR opposes the development of many age-associated pathophysiological changes, including changes to the brain and changes in learning and behavior. One goal of studying CR in rodent is to determine the mechanisms by which it retards aging to design interventions that duplicate those effects. The methods that we use for conducting CR studies on mice and rhesus monkeys are described. We employ procedures designed to achieve a high degree of caloric control for all animals in the study. As used in our studies, this control includes the following features: 1) animals are individually housed, and 2) all individuals in the control group eat the same number of calories (i.e., they are not fed ad lib). Although this method results in strict caloric control for all animals, there seems to be considerable procedural flexibility for the successful conduct of CR studies.

The historical development, efficacy and safety of very-low-calorie diets.

The development of very-low-calorie diets (VLCD) over the lats 50 years is described, from the early work of the Pittsburgh group in 1930, using conventional food, to the present day liquid-formula diets containing all essential nutrients. Recent work has been concerned with the protein requirements of obese patients consuming 200-400 kcal (0.8-1.6MJ) VLCD. Independent studies indicate that the protein requirement is about 40-55 g/day without carbohydrate, and about 25-30 g/day when carbohydrate (30-45 g/day) is included. Although some workers use VLCD consisting only of protein, the author prefers those also containing carbohydrate because they prevent excessive ketosis, hyperuricemia, diuresis, electrolyte loss, re-feeding oedema, and may improve muscular endurance. Numerous clinical trials have shown VLCD to be highly effective in about 80 per cent of outpatients and give an average weight loss of 2 kg/week which is comparable to that seen in complete starvation. Clinical studies of up to 16 weeks and longer in numerous medical schools in Europe have demonstrated their safety in patients under medical supervision. Whilst the achievement of a normal body weight in most obese patients is now a reality, the main problem for the future is to achieve permanent weight loss.