http://www.nynewsday.com/nyc-mike01...pheadlines-left

Mayor Eats His Words

By Glenn Thrush, Staff Writer, January 21, 2004, 5:50 PM EST

Mayor Michael Bloomberg seems to be done with the diet-tribes.

A day after telling pasta-chomping Brooklyn firemen that low-carb guru Robert Atkins may have died from a high-fat diet -- and not from a 2002 fall -- a more subdued Mayor Mike softened his language.

"I would never criticize somebody else about their waistline," Bloomberg said Wednesday after swearing in police recruits in Brooklyn. "Let me just say you are what you eat."

During a lunchtime photo-op with firefighters at Engine 292/Ladder 148 on Tuesday, Bloomberg opined: "Atkins is dead. I don't believe that ––– that he dropped dead slipping on a sidewalk. Yeah, right."

The mayor -- who thought his utterances weren't being recorded by TV camermen huddled around him in the firehouse kitchen -- went on to diss dishes Atkins himself served.

"I actually went to his house out in Southampton for a Pataki fund-raiser two years ago," he said in audio picked up cable news channel New York 1. "The guy was fat, big guy, but heavy. And the food was inedible. I took one appetizer and I had to spit it into my napkin. It was just terrible."

A Bloomberg spokesman said the comments were off-the-record and shouldn't have been recorded.

The station countered that the mayor spoke at a scheduled public event, surrounded by a dozen or more journalists with high-tech recording devices.

Atkins died at age 72 last year after slipping on a midtown sidewalk during a snowstorm. His nationally popular diet calls for a mix of beef, pork and other high-protein foods.

Bloomberg, 61, who jogs in Central Park and on a treadmill several times a week, has trimmed down since taking office in January 2002, largely through a low-fat diet heavy on veggies.

"As you get older you have to worry about your waistline more," Bloomberg said Wednesday.