That article was excellent

However, there is one important distinction between the low fat craze and the low carb craze that the pessimists fail to see.

Low fat started out from the gate as accepted by the establishment. People right from the beginning were told by doctors and the establishment that cutting fat intake was good.
The meaning of this distinction being it wasn't a positive word-of-mouth situation that brought the low fat craze from infancy to it's zenith... in fact, most people found just the opposite true. Low fat started out accepted and pushed, and only took everyone else a while to "catch on" (read: be indoctrinated into) to the trend. The bottom line is, the low fat trend was not fueled by word of mouth, at the basic social foundation, of it's effectiveness. They were sold into a pyramid scheme.

Never would you here from someone say "oh hey check out this new [generic-low-fat] diet... it's great! I feel better than ever, losing weight in gobs, and best of all I'm not hungry!!!" No, people struggled to do low fat. The reason they struggled to do low fat, despite the fact it was less enjoyable and equally effective as plain old calorie restriction, is because their drs. and the government were all telling them they should do it if they want to lose weight and be healthy.

Low fat was very much like a pyramid scheme. Well, the pyramid is now about to collapse because the people at the bottom have stopped buying.

However, atkins is an opposite pyramid. Atkins started right from the start as being condemned by the establishment as foolish irresponsible quackery, dangerous, ineffective, and unhealthy. However, something interesting happened. It turned out it worked, and it grew in popularity among the pyramid base. Word of mouth did it's thing as people boasted about the weight loss and health improving benefits of low carbing, and it slowly grew in popularity until our leaders and marketplace could no longer ignore it.

This is the difference. We were aggressively sold low fat, but we had to fight to buy low carb. Low carb from its inception was fueled by substance; real people all found it helped them and was enjoyable even despite massive resistance from the establishment. On the other hand, low fat was fueled on a lot of hypotheticals, a lot of maybes disseminated from the medical establishment and government giving it the stamp of approval, but not a lot of real world evidence observed in the consumers.

This is why low carb is not even close to being a fad, and it's not even a trend. It's momentum is fueled by the real world improvements in health and control over eating habits of real people. It's a revolution of the way we look at human nutritional needs.