Diet in Diabetes

Abstract

Despite the long recognition of diabetes as a clinical entity, no successful method of treating the disease existed until the nineteenth century, when Rollo and Bourchadat discovered independently the value of dietary restriction. The latter noted the disappearance of glycosuria in diabetics when food was scarce during the Siege of Paris, and applied that observation to the management of his patients. In the twentieth century, Frederick Allen's work (Allen, 1914, 1917, 1923 ; Allen and Sherrill, 1922) on undernutrition in experimental diabetes in dogs put the dietary treatment of diabetes on a more rational basis. The clinical results obtained by the use of restricted diets were good in the case of mild and obese diabetics, but among other diabetics deaths from diabetic coma and tuberculosis were very common. Pregnancy was an exceedingly rare occurrence, and diabetic children did not grow satisfactorily. The discovery of insulin by Banting and Best in 1921 revo- lutionized the treatment of the disease. Since its intro- duction the necessity for subcaloric diets, and indeed for dietary restriction of any kind, has become a matter of controversy.