The Value Of Fat
	But what happens when a healthy body plant doesn't operate in this manner-when the restricted food intake is not followed by a loss of excess weight? What happens in the body to prevent it from responding in a predictable manner? We must go back to Banting and Harvey, who first indicated by their successful experiment that carbohydrates might be to blame, and follow the line of research and experiment to its latest expression in the low carbohydrate diet to reach the answer. If you cannot lose weight by following orthodox nutritional patterns, you may be the victim of a fairly common biochemical quirk which keeps your body from burning up its carbohydrate intake at the normal rate, and stores it up instead as fat. Because controlled-carbohydrate diets get the right results, we know that this happens. But precisely how it happens is not so easily demonstrated. One theory suggests that a hormone or enzyme deficiency may be to blame. Another, and a possibly related one, is concerned with the subtle interactions of body chemistry and metabolism far too complex for the layman really to follow. In every important research centre, physiologists, biochemists, and nutritionists are investigating these problems; for our purposes it is enough to know that carbohydrate control works in weight reduction. If this smacks of the 'I don't know much about art but I know what I like' school of thought, reflect that the science of nutrition itself, as applied to actual food programmes, did not get under full sail much before the start of the twentieth century, when researchers established the importance of protein in the animal world. Man, of course, has been interested in the quantity, quality, and taste of his food ever since he has been around to eat it, but until recently his food habits reflected his standards of living, not his understanding of what happened to the food inside him, because this knowledge was not available. The poor and simple have always subsisted on whatever they could catch, kill, or grow most handily. The rich, as far back as pre-Biblical times, were wont to live on rich meats and 'the fat of the land'. In more sophisticated civilizations, the truly riotous liver expanded his horizons by combining flavours and adding spices to his viands. Through trial and error they all found out that there were things they could digest and things they couldn't. It has remained for the laboratories and research teams of this century to start telling us how, and why, this happens. Next: The Imbalance Of The Balanced Diet