History of Slimming Diets up to the Late 1950s

This 2022 review in MDPI’s Obesities surveys slimming and weight-loss regimens from antiquity to the late 1950s. The archive cites it as independent secondary corroboration of the macrobiotic-longevity lineage rather than for any medical finding. Two points are load-bearing here: the review frames the Venetian Luigi Cornaro’s 16th-century spare-diet regimen as an “Immortality Diet” (his Four Discourses on a Sober Life), and it describes Christoph Hufeland’s Macrobiotics as the work that introduced “the art of prolonging human life” into European circulation, both of which match the framing used in the Hufeland case and the Cornaro claim. The review’s Cornaro ration figure, about 12 ounces of food and 14 ounces of wine per day, differs by one ounce of drink from the Erasmus Wilson 1867 English edition cited elsewhere in this archive (about 12 ounces of food and 13 ounces of drink); the difference reflects different editions and renderings of Cornaro’s Trattato della vita sobria and is recorded as a cross-check, not a correction. The bibliographic metadata was copied from the article’s published record; the paper is open access under CC BY 4.0, and its authors declared no conflict of interest.