S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Corpulence
Fortunately, we are able to reassure our fat friends; no operation is involved in the modern system of treating their superfluities. Dr. Dancel’s grand principle is this: to diminish embonpoint without affecting the health, the patient must live principally on meat (eating but a small quantity of other aliment) and drinking but little, and that little not water. In a hundred parts of human fat, there are seventy-nine of carbon, fifteen and a fraction of hydrogen, and five and a fraction of oxygen. But water is nothing but the protoxide of hydrogen; and hydrogen is one of the main elements of fat. Therefore, the aspirant after leanness must eat but few vegetables, or watery messes, or hot rolls, puddings, tarts, potatoes, haricots, pease-soup, charlottes, sweet biscuits, apple-rolls, nor cakes in any of their protean forms; because all these dainties have carbon and oxygen for their principal bases. If he will persist in living on leguminous, farinaceous, and liquid diet, he will make fat as certainly as the bee makes honey by sucking flowers.