THE WASHINGTON POST

November 5, 2002


In a head-to-head comparison between two popular and distinctly different eating plans, the Atkins diet trimmed significantly more pounds and body fat in obese but otherwise healthy women than a traditional low-fat diet, according to a report released last week at the annual meeting of the American Dietetics Association.

The study enrolled 53 women, aged 31 to 59, for six months. Half followed a low-fat approach, eating 30 percent of calories from fat.

The other half ate according to the very-low-carbohydrate diet popularized by physician Robert Atkins.

Those in the Atkins group shed on average 18.5 pounds - about 10 from body fat. (The rest was due to loss of water and lean muscle.) By comparison, the low-fat group lost about nine pounds, about five of them from body fat.


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I don't know if they know it yet, but they have lost.

When it boils down to it, people want to loose weight. The social pressure is such that they are willing to use dangerous and unhealthy methods to achieve this goal. Those means have included taking drugs and undergoing surgery.

They can lecture all they want Atkins is dangerous, people will try it if they think it will give them results.

So now the medical profession has no choice to run studies to prove everyone Atkins is bad. Unfortunately for them, all the studies seem to be proving the contrary.

So they try to explain away the results, but it's getting harder and harder. As as the studies cummulate, they are getting fairer because SOME people are starting to loose some of their long-standing preconceptions.

The damn is cracking and leaking, soon it will give way altogether.

The whole Atkins debate reminds me of the one that occurred when some Australian Doctors first discovered the true cause of most gastric ulcers and that treatment with antibacterial drugs was generally successful. It took a long time for the Medical establishment to accept the idea that Heloibacter pylori was responsible and the poor doctors were fairly severely criticized for a while. In fact, I believe it took 10 years before the truth was finally accepted. A couple of Pharmaceutical companies that sold drugs that alleviated the symptoms, but did not cure the disease, had a strong interest in maintaining a supply of sick patients. I suspect similar, even more powerful forces are at work in the case of the Atkins WOE. A significant portion of the US (and Canadian) economy depends on carbohydrates and the problems associated with their use – just walk into a grocery store, as I am sure you all have, and total up how many of the products are based on carbohydrates. What would happen if everyone quit buying this stuff? On the other hand, think of all the celebrity nutritionists that would be out of business *grin*.