Ridiculous? It Works
	But meanwhile, many determined, or perhaps desperate, fat people tried Banting's diet, and found that ridiculous or not, it worked. This meant that the theory behind it could not be dismissed quite so lightly. The noted Dr. Felix von Niemeyer of Stuttgart undertook to investigate it, and succeeded in bringing off a curious shift of emphasis by which it was to appear that the meat in Banting's diet had been lean meat, trimmed of fat. He was left, therefore, with what we would now call a high protein diet, low in fat and carbohydrates. Dr. von Niemeyer was willing to go along with this, and with his endorsement so was every other physician interested in obesity. These altered 'Banting Diets' became very popular, and explain how it was that 'banting' became synonymous with 'slimming' in England around the turn of the century. But to the end of his days William Banting maintained that the modified diet was, in principle and in practice, far inferior to the diet which had so altered his life and on which he had been allowed to eat plenty of fat with his meat. Interesting confirmation that it was possible to get along with few or even no carbohydrates in the diet came in 1906, when a young Harvard anthropology instructor named Viiljalmur Stefansson eagerly accepted a chance to go to the Arctic with the Leffingwell-Millelson Expedition. Stefansson-who afterwards of course became a world-famous anthropologist-explorer-went on ahead, planning to rendezvous with the expedition's ship at Herschel Island. But by some chance the rendezvous miscarried, and Stefansson was left to spend an Arctic winter with the Eskimos. Next: Artric Diet: Fish Washed Down With Water