Update on the Atkins plan
By Dr Thomas Stuttaford

THE BRIEF spells of sun last weekend brought out the first butterflies. But it is not only butterflies that emerge with warmer weather. Pasty, flabby office workers are tempted to wander through city parks during their lunch hours. They have shed their layers of winter clothing and may be feeling slightly self-conscious about exposing their expanded waistlines.
Fears about the effects of obesity, such as diabetes and heart disease, have little impact on young people. Their motivation to lose weight is inspired by a desire to have greater sex appeal.

Last week Colette Heimowitz, a nutritionist in charge of the Atkins organisation’s educational and research facilities, visited London from the United States. The Atkins lifestyle, with its low-carbohydrate, higher protein diet, followed by a lifetime maintenance programme, has caught the public’s imagination. Anxieties about the Atkins plan may largely have been encouraged by the sudden death of Dr Atkins. Experts also thought that emphasis on ketosis — the metabolic effect of a high fat diet — as a means of inhibiting appetite lacked scientific evidence.

While in the UK Heimowitz visited Dr Susan Jebb, head of nutrition and health research at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge. Dr Jebb said that she welcomed an apparent shift in emphasis in presenting the Atkins lifestyle and the acknowledgement that no diet should contain too much saturated fat. She was equally pleased that there was an acceptance of the need for some carbohydrate in the diet.

Apparently Dr Jebb and Ms Heimowitz agreed that we should all be aiming to eat more unrefined seeds, grains, beans and root vegetables (omitting too many potatoes) and should avoid cakes, biscuits and other calorie-dense refined carbohydrates. Dr Jebb said she suspected that the success of the Atkins plan was because patients were retrained in eating habits.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/articl...1080487,00.html

Interesting strategy. Meet with your critics and find areas that you can agree on.



Strange...I thought this was what Atkins was about all along.

Isn't it amazing how once critics find out what Atkins is really about, particularly once you get to lifetime maint., they find they have little left to complain about? This applies only to the open minded critics, of course.