Sat, Aug-23-03, 17:39
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& Dillion Doggie Do!
Posts: 2,061
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Plan: Atkins, Maintenance
Stats: 221/172/147
BF:Sizes over scale!
Progress: 66%
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Dr. Atkins meets Porky Pig
A short article in the local paper over here.
Pig's tale
Dr. Atkins meets Porky Pig
August 23, 2003
Who would have thought the road to skinny runs through Smithfield?
Like, pork means porker, right?
Not right. The increasing popularity of low-carbohydrate diets - Atkins, South Beach - puts Smithfield's favorite foods front and center. Pork can be very, very good for you.
So long as you limit your sugar intake, that is.
That's the core idea behind the trendsetting Atkins diet. No longer dismissed as faddish, Atkins has become so popular among the full-figured set (and plenty of others, too, who like to eat but don't like to gain) that it's beginning to affect the overall food industry.
Egg, red meat and fish sales are picking up. Producers of sugar-laden products - cereals, bread, pasta, soft drinks - have begun offering low-carb alternatives. Anheuser-Busch is even out there with Michelob ULTRA, a low-carb beer with already promising sales.
Smithfield's meat gurus are way out front, though. A "Lean Generation" of products take the already low-fat pork a step further in the right direction with calorie and cholesterol counts below chicken breasts.
You can thank science for that - or "National Pig Development," to be specific. Really. This British program - NPD for short - came up with a genetically superior strain of pig that yields meat that's leaner and better.
Of course, they had to get the pigs over here to establish a U.S. herd. So, believe it or not, Smithfield Foods loaded 200 of them onto a Boeing 747 (free earphones for everyone) and flew them to the New World.
It's a story with a happy ending (assuming you're not a pig), because Smithfield Foods sold 104 million pounds of "Lean Generation" pork last year.
And thanks to the rush to low-carb diets (two-thirds of the American population is overweight), Smithfield may well emerge with newfound (and more than a little ironic)
fame, as the path to narrower waistlines.
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