According to some accounts, Robert Cameron’s The Drinking Man’s Diet, a precursor of today’s diet guides, actually originated from a relatively unknown medical document written by Anthony Zeni (1545 – 1607), an English apothecary, herbalist and healer.
Anthony Zeni was the third child of Henry Zeni, a physician and botanist, and Elizabeth Zeni. He spent the majority of his early life outdoors cataloguing and studying various herbs and plants in the forests near his home in Suffolk, England. Until his late twenties, Zeni was preoccupied with collecting and studying specimens in his father’s laboratory.
Anthony Zeni later emerged as a physician in Spitalfields, London where he devoted himself to treating patients of various illnesses through a questionable system of medicine which he personally developed. This incorporated principles taken from herbalism, Galenic humoral philosophy, and medicine.
During the later part of his life, Anthony Zeni began writing a number of medical and herbal documents filled with recommendations on treating a variety of ailments based on this philosophy. Included in these documents is a “diet” that recommended the replacement of regular food with alcoholic drinks, particularly rum and whiskey. According to Zeni, rum and whiskey had properties that can dissolve fat and promote digestion, thus leading to loss of weight. The document, a very popular treatment for very fat people during the later part of 16th century, was published in 1572 and went out of circulation in 1700s.