In the end, Dr Atkins had to pay up
By Adam Nicolson (Filed: 22/04/2003)
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I do hope his widow, Veronica, is not reading this - and if she is, may she forgive me - but the death of Dr Robert Atkins, the diet guru and millionaire, does, I have to admit, give me some rather obscure pleasure.
It is not the fact that he is dead, but the manner of his dying. The poor man had recently turned 70. His latest book, Atkins for Life, was recently published in America. Two older titles, Dr Atkins' New Diet Revolution and Dr Atkins' New Diet Cookbook, are both riding sky-high in the bestseller lists across the world. With all this, the super-rich diet doctor slipped on the pavement in Manhattan last week and hit his head.
New York's greatest surgeons operated to save him but he never regained consciousness. A life devoted to the cheating of the stomach was brought to an end by a combination of foot failure and skull failure. He had attended for so long to the middle (he suffered at one stage from a triple chin); but it was the extremities that let him down.
I know one should be pious at these moments. It was a life in service of millions. Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Geri Halliwell, Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta Jones would all be very different people today if they hadn't been able to "watch the fat melt away" under the low-carb/hi-protein gospel which Dr Atkins preached. But there is something about his have-it-all-and-don't-worry message which irks the puritan in me.
Just as he specialised in those unwieldy titles which spread like an out-of-control stomach across the whole extent of a paperback cover, his underlying point was that you could enjoy every conceivable benefit, you could pile on the cheese and cream cheese, you could go for fat in the pluperfect, you could eat steak for tea and pâté de foie gras for breakfast, no pat of butter could be too fat and still you could look like a film star.
The Atkins route to happiness has no discernible cost. Paradise is here and now. And it is to that idea the accident on the sidewalk is such a ringing riposte: comeuppance from the legs and head, the parts no Atkins revolution had ever reached.
Only in America could the idea of all-for-nothing sell 25 million copies of a book (it is, in effect, the same book over and over again) and Atkins's death bears a cousin relationship to two other American deaths.
On July 20, 1984, Dr Jim Fixx, author of the 1977 bestseller The Complete Book of Running, a work which effectively invented the modern craze for jogging, went for a jog in Greensboro, Vermont. He was 52. Within a minute or two, he collapsed and died of an enormous heart attack.
His autopsy revealed that of his three coronary arteries, one was 99 per cent clogged, another 80 per cent and the third 70 per cent. If he hadn't gone for a jog and had sat calmly at home reading the paper, Dr Fixx would have been fine. But he must have been eating fat for New England.
More poignant still is the death of the American whom no one has ever heard of but who wreaked more damage upon this planet than any human being, or any single organism, who has ever lived. In the First World War, Thomas Midgely invented what he called the robot bomb, in other words the first guided missile, from which every smart weapon is lineally descended.
In 1921, working for General Motors, he discovered that the addition of lead to petrol made engines run more smoothly. With Midgely as their patron saint, six trillion gallons of leaded petrol were burned over the next half century, poisoning the world's children and destroying the earth's atmosphere.
The great man then turned his genius to GM's Motors Frigidaire division, discovered the efficacy of chlorofluorocarbons as fridge coolants, which over the next 40 years were made and released into the atmosphere at the rate of 750,000 tons a year, destroying still more of the earth's atmosphere.
Midgely won all the prizes, became president of the American Chemical Society, but in middle age contracted polio. He designed an elaborate system of blocks and tackles with which to get in and out of bed. In 1944, when he was 55, he died of strangulation, suspended above his bed tangled up in his own network of ropes and pulleys, killed, as the Dictionary of American Biography puts it, "by a combination of bad luck and his own ingenuity".
Atkins, Fixx, Midgely: it is unfair to label America with these men, but there is something profoundly American about their stories. This country is now more deeply in bed with America than at any time since the heyday of Margaret Thatcher's love affair with Ronald Reagan.
The core of Thatcherism - no compromise, do what your instincts tell you and deal with the consequences later, don't pussyfoot with middle-roadism when you can see your own path clearly ahead - was, in its way, as American as the Atkins, Fixx and Midgely stories are. It, too, became tangled in its own ropes and pulleys, tripping up on the pavement, collapsing when out for its all too usual jog.
This is not a European habit of mind and the American path which Blair has taken over Iraq bears all the marks of Midgely-type thinking: turn to the simple and powerful idea; transform that idea into a powerful force; apply that force with uncompromising vigour; and only then look for collateral damage.
Blair, in trying to get the second UN resolution, attempted to Europeanise this approach, but he failed and we are left unequivocally in the American camp, deeply isolated from the other Europeans, outside the euro, outside the Schengen border-free zone and, above all, outside the Europe-wide consensus on the way to proceed in the Middle East.
It seems a curious destination for the pro-European Mr Blair to have reached. And can it really be the place in the world which this country wants to occupy, its position subsumed not in a putative Euro-superstate but in a perfectly real American one, whose governing mentality is either "You can have it all" or "Hang the consequences"?
"In the end, Dr Atkins had to pay up"
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