Контроль читання

Read the text and make the correct variant

The word ‘diet’ originally meant ‘things that people usually eat’, but, these days, we use the word to mean an eating pattern or pro­gramme designed to change something.

We could be talking about any one of many different kinds. There are diets for avoiding certain chemicals, like salt, and there are diets to increase amounts of certain things, like potassium. There are even diets to help people put on weight .

However, despite all these, we usually say ‘diet’ about losing weight. This is certainly the area where the money gets spent. And it has a long history .

But when did it all start? There’s a story that in 1087, William the Conqueror, King of England, had become so fat that he could no longer ride his horse. He stayed in bed and drank alcohol instead of eating food to try and lose weight.

Now, it may or may not have worked for him, but we can’t really reeommend it as an approach for most people. What’s important is the kinds of food you eat, because different foods contain different things our bodies need.

But it has taken a long time to find out exactly what these are. Sea travel led to some increase in understanding. When it became possible to build ships that could go on long voyages, sailors started to spend many months at sea. They also started getting a strange disease called ‘scurvy’. Eventually, it became clear that they needed fruit or vegetables to survive. Today, we know that Vitamin C is the reason.

Although the discovery helped their lives, there was much more that wasn’t known. Nobody knew, for example, why some people got fat and others didn’t, or what to do about it.

Then, in the 1890s, a chemist called Wilbur Atwater began inves­tigating how foods consisted of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.He found that he could measure the heat value of these by burning them and called a unit of this heating a‘calorie’.

This measurement he created can be seen as the start of modern food science and dieting. Since then, knowledge has come quickly — some people say too quickly!