Most people think of the Atkins diet when they hear the phrase low-carb. Indeed, Dr. Robert C. Atkins is the author of a number of low carbohydrate ketogenic diet books. The first one was published in 1972, and his pioneering efforts revolutionized the dieting world we see today. For everything that you hear; however, Dr. Atkins did not create low-carb dieting.

William Banting published pamphlets in the 1860s extolling the health benefits of the low carbohydrate diet he was put on by his medical advisor, Mr. William Harvey, F.R.C.S. The basic tenet of his diet was to consume as little as possible bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer, and potatoes due to his belief that these contained starch and saccharine matter, which tended to create fat. Mr. Banting found that his indigestion disappeared, his umbilical rupture was cured, he lost 50 lbs, his sight and hearing were surprising for a man in his 70s, he slept better at night, and he basically felt in better health than he had for the previous 26 years of his life. Mr. Banting revolutionized dieting in his time, and he received thousands of letters from readers thanking him and telling him how his low carbohydrate diet had changed their lives for the better.

The Johns Hopkins University and Mayo Clinic devised a diet to treat epilepsy in the 1920s. The diet requires high fat consumption and a low intake of carbohydrates in order to induce ketosis. They studied how the diet worked with children who were unsuccessful in treating their epilepsy with medication, and they found that 55 percent of the original patients remained on the diet and 27 percent had a greater than 90 percent decrease in their seizures. There were some children who had no seizures for two years while on the diet, and they appeared to be cured of the epilepsy even after stopping their low-carb ketogenic diet.

Walter Lyons Bloom and Gordon Azar did a study in 1963 comparing carbohydrate restrictive diets to fasting diets. They concluded that eating a diet adequate in calories, protein and fat, but deficient in carbohydrate, resulted in weight loss similar to that of fasting patients.

The first truly popular low-carb diet was popularized in the book The Doctor