Process for Sugar-Induced Fat Formation

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas are one step closer to understanding how high carbohydrate diets lead to obesity and diabetes.

Dr. Kosaku Uyeda, professor of biochemistry, has shown that a single protein called carbohydrate response element binding protein (ChREBP), discovered by his research group, activates several genes that cause cells in the liver to turn sugar into fat.

Their work appears in two studies in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The first study, published in an earlier issue, is available online, and the second, also online, will appear in an upcoming issue of PNAS.

“Purifying ChREBP from rat livers took two postdoctoral fellows two years of very hard work,” said Dr. Uyeda, senior author of both studies and a research scientist at the Veterans Affairs North Texas Health Care System. “With the discovery of this factor, the biochemical mechanism of how carbohydrates are converted to fat has become clearer.”

Eating meals high in carbohydrates or sugars leads the body to do several things. Some of the sugars are immediately converted to energy while the rest of the sugars are converted to fat. The sugar-to-fat conversion occurs two ways – an immediate response, where enzymes are mobilized to rapidly convert sugars into fat; and a slower response, in which several different genes are turned on and off, creating more enzymes that can also turn sugar into fat. ChREBP is involved in the slow response...

Read full article: Newswise

At last, scientific proof that the Atkins diet works

From The Times, UK

By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor
PEOPLE on the Atkins diet do lose weight quickly without damaging changes in their cholesterol levels, according to two new studies.

The results forced one leading nutritionist to admit that dieticians who had disparaged the Atkins diet for years could no longer dismiss low-carbohydrate diets. Walter Willett, of Harvard School of Public Health, added that the diet’s creator, the late Dr Robert Atkins, deserved credit for his observations.

The research is the latest dispatch in the diet wars between Atkins, who promoted a high-fat, meat-packed menu low in carbohydrates such as bread and potatoes, and the dietary establishment, which prefers low-fat diets.

Previously, most nutritionists have acknowledged that it is possible to lose weight on the Atkins diet but believed that it could have bad long-term health consequences.

The new studies go some way towards disproving that. But one also shows that calorie-counting low-fat diets work just as well if followed for a year, but are not as effective in the shorter term.

The Atkins Foundation helped to fund the research by Duke University Medical Centre in Durham, North Carolina but had no involvement in the work. In it, 120 obese adults between 18 and 65 were randomly allocated to an Atkins or to a low-fat diet.

After six months, the average weight loss on Atkins was 26lb, and on the low-fat diet 14lb, the team reports in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The Atkins dieters lost more body fat, had lowered levels of trigycerides (fats) in the bloodstream and raised levels of the “good” form of cholesterol — two changes that should enhance the health of their heart and circulation.

The results surprised the team. “This diet can be quite powerful” said Will Yancy. “The weight loss surprised me, to be honest with you. We also found that cholesterol levels seemed to improve more on a low-carb diet compared with a low-fat diet.” A second study — not funded by Atkins — in the same issue of the journal followed 132 obese adults, most suffering from diabetes, for 12 months. Half were assigned to an Atkins-like diet, half to a low-fat diet.

At the six-month point, the Atkins dieters had lost more weight, but then stabilised and the low-fat group began to catch up. By 12 months the low-carb dieters had lost 11lb-19lb, the low-fat dieters 7lb-19lb. But once again, blood changes favoured the Atkins dieters. Those with diabetes also controlled their blood sugar better on the Atkins diet.

Linda Stern, who led the study at the Veterans Affairs Medical Centre in Philadelphia, said: “A low-carbohydrate diet is a good choice because much of our overeating has to do with consumption of too many carbohydrates.”

Source: The Times, UK

High fat diet gives girl new life

From the BBC

A four-year-old Cornwall girl with a severe form of epilepsy is free from blackouts thanks to an 80% fat diet.

Sarah Laslett's diet includes cream, butter, nuts and eggs and is devised by Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in London.

As Sarah burns off the fat her body produces ketones which protect the brain against seizures.

Sarah, from Morval near Looe, no longer suffers scores of blackouts and seizures every day.

The youngster has Myoclomic Astatic epilepsy, a rare, drug-resistant form of epilepsy that triggers scores of blackouts and seizures every day.

"Her exuberance is wonderful and she has been completely transformed"
--Teacher Sonia Barrett

The attacks started eight months ago and meant Sarah had to wear a helmet when she was playing.

Then her family found out about a trial at Great Ormond Street of the ketogenic diet.

The high fat, low carboydrate, low protein diet is so finely balanced it has to be carefully calculated by experts who are on hand for advice and support.

One of the key features is restrictions on high-sugar foods, breads, pasta, cereal and starchy vegetables.

Mealtimes are a well-practiced routine of measuring food to within a gramme.

Water regulated

For instance, breakfast could consist of 25 grammes of cream, mixed with water, 43 grammes of egg, mixed with another 25 grammes of cream and 15 grammes of butter, followed by 21 grammes of fruit.

Different types of fruit have different carbohydrate levels so that too has to be adjusted.

Sarah also drinks a carefully regulated 120 millilitres of water an hour, to keep her hydrated, but also to avoid constipation and kidney stones.

Teacher Sonia Barrett has been looking after her at school since she became ill last September.

It has been 24 days since Sarah's last blackout but she still wears a helmet to play outside - just in case the fits return.

*£25,000 raised*

Ms Barrett said: "Only four weeks ago she would just sit very still. There was no animation and she seemed very sleepy a lot of the time.

"Now she is full of life. Her exuberance is wonderful and she has been completely transformed."

Sarah's family has also raised £25,000 to continue a trial at the hospital for another year and help other children like Sarah.

Her mother Alex said: "It's brilliant because other children now hopefully will get the same chance that Sarah's had to do this diet.

"I couldn't believe how a diet could make such a dramatic difference but for Sarah, this has been a miracle."

Great Ormond Street is recruiting children with severe epilepsy for the trial, although patients will need a referral from their paediatric consultant.

'Bunless burger' heads for Britain

By Frances Booth | The Independent

11 April 2004

The late Dr Robert Atkins achieved fame and fortune with his revolutionary diet, selling 15 million books.

Now it seems he has redefined one of the world's most popular institutions: the McDonald's burger.

With millions of customers now sticking to the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, McDonald's has announced the launch of the bun-free burger. The meal will be wrapped in lettuce leaves instead of bread, and come with a knife and fork.

A "bunless revolution" is now sweeping the United States, where McDonald's said last week it would offer burgers without buns in all 13,600 of its restaurants. The new-style burger will be offered for all beef, fish or chicken sandwiches sold in the US from next month.

And Britain could soon follow suit. Thanks to the endorsement of stars such as Renée Zelwegger and Geri Halliwell, more than three million Atkins books have been sold in Britain and Atkins-branded meals are now on offer in supermarkets.

McDonald's has been struggling with falling sales in Britain and has already tried to attract new customers by offering healthier options such as salads, Quorn sandwiches, organic semi-skimmed milk and fruit. The bunless burger could help turn its fortunes around.

A spokesman said: "We are a customer-led business, we listen to what our customers want. A bunless burger is something we would consider in the future if consumers wanted it."

Cereals don't deserve to be called food

By Marika Sboros

How healthy are your ready-to-eat breakfast cereals?

Manufacturers say their products are high in carbohydrates, low in fat, with added vitamins and minerals. Health benefits, they say, include high-energy boosts for peak mental and physical performance, weight loss, and reduced risk of heart disease.

Market leader Bokomo even advertises its Pro Nutro as "the most nutritious family cereal in South Africa" - a claim contested by competitors, but sanctioned by the Advertising Standards Authority.

But, medical specialists say if you eat the cereals at all, you'd be wise not to do so regularly, and you shouldn't let your children eat them everyday.

'You'd be wise not to do so regularly'
They say we are being hoodwinked into believing the cereals are a healthy way to start the day. It's a common perception with particular appeal for harassed parents with picky mouths to feed on the run.

Concerns focus on refined, processed, sugared, salted products, especially brightly coloured ones. Experts say the nature of the cereals - high-carb, low fat content - creates conditions for the development of health problems they are supposed to prevent.

One vocal cereal antagonist is Dr Sterna Franzsen, a Pretoria general practitioner and gynaecologist who practises complementary medicine calls the cereals, including "natural" muesli products, "rubbish" and "windkos". She says they don't deserve to be called food, so far removed are they from their natural state.

Dr John Briffa is another. He is a medical doctor and one of Britain's foremost nutritional experts. He says the cereals "peddle fodder as food". The notion that we should eat them every day is driven "by the food industry, not science and our experience".

Far from helping us to slim, refined cereals can actually make us fat, Briffa says. Their high-carb content stimulates the body to manufacture fat, and reduces its fat-burning potential. A high-carb diet may also lead to higher-than-ideal levels of the hormone insulin in the body, which can lead to high blood pressure, raised levels of unhealthy blood fats and increased risk of type 2 diabetes.

'The greatest scam in medicine's history'
Of course not all packaged cereals are equal, and some, such as 100 percent rolled oats (not instant), are less refined. But concerns make sense when you look at ingredient lists of ready-to-eat cereals, with sugar high up. Many start off with natural rice or corn, strip its nutritional value by refining and processing, and then claim to put back all the goodness by adding vitamins and minerals.

Is this purely to create demand and a longer shelf life? And what is the rationale justifying these products?

Kellogg's and Bokomo say it's not about shelf life, but about food safety, nutritional availability, variety and convenience. They say their products are based on sound nutritional science, that shows carbohydrates are essential, and the best source of energy.

Briffa and others say the cereals depend on myth, misinformation and ignorance about biochemistry and nutrition, and the power of vested interests. They depend on the lipid (fat) hypothesis, introduced by researchers to explain a disturbing increase in heart disease, cancer and obesity rates.

The hypothesis fingered cholesterol and saturated fats in animal foods such as butter, eggs and red meat as causing problems. Yet these were in the diet for years before the rising incidence of life-threatening diseases, says Briffa.

Researchers chose to ignore unusual changes in diets, especially the introduction of highly refined, processed carbohydrates, such as sugar, white bread, flour, pasta, and lifestyle habits of smoking and reduced physical activity.

Studies appeared to confirm the hypothesis, and doctors began to pronounce confidently that "it is convincingly clear that saturated animal fat is the dietary risk factor in raising cholesterol concentrations". Many still do so today.

The hypothesis spawned the notion that high-carb, low-fat foods promote health.

"They don't," says Briffa, "and the evidence is there for anyone willing to see it. "For instance, studies show that in the long-term, low-fat diets do not lead to weight loss. The totality of the evidence shows saturated fat is very unlikely to be the true villain of the health piece."

This is still disputed in medical circles. The South African Heart Foundation has moved from the low-fat stance, but still recommends decreasing fat and a good carb intake.

Others say the effects of the lipid hypothesis have been insidious. Amercican heart researcher Dr George Mann called it "the greatest scam in medicine's history", used to "convince millions of healthy people they are sick and need expensive drugs with serious side effects".

Briffa says we should look at the many traditional societies who eat high levels of animal food and saturated fat but remain free of heart disease. One of them is the Masai cattle-herding people in Africa who eat meat, blood and rich milk, yet their heart disease rates remain refreshingly low.

Eggs have had undeservedly bad press. Studies in rural communities show that high egg consumption does not increase heart disease risk.

The most likely cause is inactivity coupled with pervasive changes to our diets, says Briffa.

"Increasingly, we have been eating a diet denuded of much of its nutritional value, at the same time tainted with potentially hazardous components including trans-fatty acids, salt, refined sugar and artificial additives."

He says the healthiest diet is that of our ancestors which was varied, with flesh foods, fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and small amounts of unrefined carbs.

Our diets are too high in carbohydrates from grains, refined or unrefined, says Briffa. "Genetically, we are similar to our ancestors of 10 000 years ago, which means we are best adapted to the diet we ate before grains were used."

Today there is a lot of hype about high or low GI (glycaemic index) foods. The index rates the speed with which foods release their sugar content into the bloodstream.

"Cereal manufacturers have leapt on to the GI bandwagon," says Briffa. "They try to give the impression that their products have low GIs, but the reality is most cereals release sugar quickly."

Eaten in excess, refined carbohydrates may have "significant hazards for our health".

How cereal is made:

Kellogg's Corn Flakes:

A non-genetically modified variety of corn grown for about 180 days.

The hybrid corn is harvested, stored in silos and sorted at the mill.

The milling process includes cleaning. Only split kernel of a specific size is used, with a formula of malt flavour, salt and sugar.

Flavoured grits are funnelled into stainless-steel cookers. Heat-stable vitamins and iron are added. The grits are dried and put through rollers to form flakes.

The flakes are tumble-toasted in an oven.

Contents are weighed into moisture-resistant liners, sealed to form bags, and packed into sealed, date-coded cartons.

Sub-standard wet or dry waste is sold for animal feed. No food or ingredient is deliberately prepared for animal feed. - Source: Kellogg's

Source: http://www.iol.co.za

'Healthy' Diet May Increase Bad Cholesterol

Source: Yahoo

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - There is a plethora of evidence suggesting that low-fat diets, particularly those rich in fruits and vegetables are "healthy." However, in a small study of women, a diet low in fat and high in fruits and vegetables caused an increase in the plasma levels of oxidized LDL cholesterol, the "bad" cholesterol.

This finding was unexpected, Dr. Marja-Leena Silaste from the University of Oulu in Finland and colleagues write in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis. and Vascular Biology: Journal of the American Heart Association (news - web sites).

To explore how alterations in diet affect LDL levels, researchers put 37 healthy women on two different diets. Both diets were low in total and saturated fat. One was low in vegetables and the other high in vegetables and fruits.

They discovered that blood levels of LDL increased by 27 percent in response to the low-fat, low-vegetable diet and 19 percent in response to the low-fat, high-vegetable diet. Both diets also produced small but significant decreases in HDL "good" cholesterol.

Silaste and colleagues think the "most likely reason" for the increase in LDL levels in response to the diets is the increase in a carrier protein called lipoprotein a.

This is certainly possible, Dr. Mohamad Navab and colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, write in an editorial, but there are other possibilities as well.

"Whatever the explanation, the findings by Silaste et al are sure to provide the basis for further exciting and potentially important studies," they write.

SOURCE: Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, March 2004.

Put Fat Children on Atkins Diet

Overweight children should be put on Atkins-style diets to lose weight and prevent life-threatening diseases, a cancer specialist claimed today.

Professor Julian Peto, from the Institute of Cancer Research, believes high protein, low carbohydrate diets could be the solution to the country’s soaring obesity problem.

He told BBC Radio 5 Live: “We have a major obesity problem in this country. It is now overtaking smoking as the number one killer and I am very concerned that we need to tackle it early.

“Children especially need to be targeted. We should be weighing children in school regularly and we need to rethink dietary advice because the current advice clearly isn’t working.”

Full article: scotsman.com

The Diet-Heart Hypothesis: A Critique

Published in the American Journal of Cardiology:

Sylvan Lee Weinberg, MD, MACC
Dayton, Ohio

The low-fat "diet heart hypothesis" has been controversial for nearly 100 years. The low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, promulgated vigorously by the National Cholesterol Education Program, National Institutes of Health, and American Heart Association since the Lipid Research Clinics-Primary Prevention Program in 1984, and earlier by the U.S. Department of Agriculture food pyramid, may well have played an unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity, lipid abnormalities, type II diabetes, and metabolic syndromes. This diet can no longer be defended by appeal to the authority of prestigious medical organizations or by rejecting clinical experience and a growing medical literature suggesting that the much-maligned low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet may have a salutary effect on the epidemics in question.
(J Am Coll Cardiol 2004;43:731-3) © 2004 by the American College of Cardiology Foundation

Download the full article (published with author's permission): The Diet-Heart Hypothesis - A Critique [.pdf file]

Is This Man Obese?

Source: B2DAY

"It's hard to believe Robert Atkins weighed 258 pounds when he died last April, as the Wall Street Journal contended Tuesday. Last February, just a couple of months before his death, I had dinner with the diet doctor at a French restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and was most struck by how frail he seemed. He wasn't thin, but it was hard to see his physique exactly because it was the day after a big blizzard and he was wearing a thick sweater. Atkins ordered fish, went without bread or potatoes, and had cappuccino with cream. He did say something about wanting to take off a few pounds. But we're talking three, not 50. These photos were taken for our story on February 24, about two months before Atkins's April 17 death. Does he look as if he's 60 pounds overweight to you?"



[click to enlarge]

Steak Through the Heart?

By Neil Cavuto

I think it's time to update you on a few key facts on this Atkins situation.

Update 1: He's dead. He can't defend himself.

Update 2: His medical records were made public. How would you like that to happen to you, or a loved one?

Update 3: The people who revealed those records were a group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Update 4: That group advocates vegetarianism and is among the Atkins diet's biggest critics.

Update 5: They seem to have an axe to grind.

Update 6: They seem to be selective when they grind that ax.

Update 7: Atkins was not, and I repeat was not, obese at the end of his life. According to a hospital record obtained by USA Today, the good doctor was all of 195 pounds when he was admitted to a hospital after a fall on April 8, 2003.

Update 8: He lapsed into a coma and died nine days later. No one, and I repeat no one, knows for sure how much weight he gained with water retention while he was comatose. But clearly, it wasn't the fault of a guy downing ring-dings. For god's sake, he was dying!

Update 9: Dr. Atkins had cardiomyopathy that resulted from a viral infection, not his diet.

Update 10: I had a chance to see Dr. Atkins several times over the last few years. He always seemed in pretty good shape to me. And why wouldn't he be? He was the face of a diet revolution for more than 40 years! You don't stay on message if you're not staying in shape. And Atkins did and was.

They say dead men tell no tales. I just pity the fact this dead man can't tell his critics where to get off.

Let them eat their vegetables. But for god's sake, let this man rest in peace.

Watch Neil Cavuto's Common Sense weekdays at 4 p.m. ET on Your World with Cavuto.

Source: foxnews.com

Veronica Atkins on Illegal Distribution Dr. Atkins' Medical Records

Press Release Source: Veronica Atkins

Statement by Veronica Atkins on the Illegal Distribution of Personal Medical Information Regarding Her Late Husband Dr. Robert C. Atkins

NEW YORK, Feb. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- I have always assumed that my husband's personal medical history is private and of no concern or relevance to the media or general public. Prior to today, I have not seen any reason to share Dr. Atkins' private information with the public. I am sure that any one of you would be offended and perhaps even horrified to have complete strangers intrude into your personal family matters, especially with regard to something as intimate as your medical records or those of your loved one.

It has now become clear to me that if I don't speak out, unscrupulous individuals will continue to twist and pervert the truth in an attempt to destroy the reputation and great work of my late husband. These individuals have gone so far as to obtain my husband's personal and confidential medical information from the New York City Medical Examiner's office for distribution to news organizations in direct and knowing violation of federal law. Obviously such people will have no trouble picking and choosing bits and pieces of fact and supposition to mislead the world.

But here is the truth: my husband's medical records have been reviewed by knowledgeable doctors and his medical condition discussed with cardiac specialists. It is clear that Dr. Atkins developed a condition called cardiomyopathy approximately three years prior to his death. It is also true that when Robert developed cardiomyopathy his coronary arteries showed only minimal and clinically insignificant signs of coronary artery disease, consistent with what would be expected in a 69-year old man. Cardiomyopathy is a serious and progressive condition and was, I have been told, in Robert's case, caused by a viral infection. Though this condition significantly weakened his heart, its cause was clearly related to an infection and not his diet.

All of this was well documented and openly discussed by Robert himself on national television. Additionally, as Dr. Atkins explained on Larry King Live and other public appearances, he did have a witnessed cardiac arrest in April of 2002. All accounts and records related to this event, and the insight of his treating cardiologist, are consistent with conditions arising from his cardiomyopathy, rather than a lack of blood flow. While Robert did have some progression of his coronary artery disease in the last three years of his life including some new blockage of a secondary artery that was remedied during this admission, he did not have a heart attack.

There is no evidence to suggest otherwise and for any physician to suggest so would be irresponsible, unethical and represent nothing more than an attempt to tarnish the reputation of a man who dedicated his life to solving one of medicines greatest challenges -- the obesity epidemic. Let me state emphatically that I have been assured by my husband's physicians that my husband's health problems late in life were completely unrelated to his diet or any diet.

It is also clear that my husband's death resulted from a serious head injury that occurred April 8th, 2003. Hospital records obviously and unequivocally detail the unfortunate clinical course that transpired following arrival of Emergency Medical Services through the entirety of hospitalization, confirming that after losing consciousness en route to the hospital, Robert's condition failed to improve despite emergency neurosurgical treatment for bleeding within his head. In life, Dr. Atkins was adamant about not wanting life support and when his wishes were honored, and ventilator life support was withdrawn on April 17th, he passed away as has been widely reported in the media.

But it has become clear to me that something as simple as the truth will be perverted and manipulated by dishonest individuals who will stop at nothing and will proceed without any regard for medical ethics or the previously private medical history of Dr. Atkins in an attempt not only to discredit my husband's work but to profit from his death. Work, I might add, that has been consistently and repeatedly vindicated by 18 independent scientific studies over these past three years. I now find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to relive his horrific accident and defend my late husband from people who would convince you that stolen and irrelevant bits and pieces of Dr. Atkins' medical history carry more validity than published scientifically controlled and peer reviewed research out of Harvard, Duke University, the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health.

It is for these reasons that I realized that I must put aside my grief and pain and speak out. Make no mistake about it, Dr. Atkins, at the end of life, was struggling with the effects of his cardiomyopathy and did not hide that fact. Despite repeated, often pathetic and now even illegal attempts by his most bizarre and extreme detractors to make the health of this 72 year old man THE central issue in the all important obesity debate raging in this country and around the world, it is not and never will be relevant. It is a sad and distracting sideshow, taking time away from an intelligent debate of the known science. We should all ask, is caring about what someone else eats so important that some doctors are willing to betray their most basic of oaths, to protect a patient's dignity and confidentiality? It is time to forget the myths and urban legends perpetuated by extremists like those who acted unethically in disclosing my husband's records and pay more attention to the real issues and all available peer reviewed science. I will do my utmost to put an end to this nonsense so that responsible physicians can focus on a debate rooted in fact and moderation and objectivity. We will not engage in espionage, tabloid journalism, or try to shout louder than these shameless individuals and I look forward to the day when Dr. Atkins' soul can rest in peace and I can grieve uninterrupted.

Source: Veronica Atkins
biz.yahoo.com

*FURTHER READING*

Press Release Source: Stuart Trager, M.D.

Statement by Stuart Trager, M.D., Chair, Atkins Physicians Council on February 10, 2004 Report on Dr. Atkins Weight at the Time of his Death

NEW YORK, Feb. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Today's Wall Street Journal ran a story on the health of Dr. Robert Atkins and grossly distorted and inaccurately reported information that Dr. Atkins was obese at the time of his death. In fact, up until the time he became comatose and lay in the hospital for two weeks. Dr. Atkins' average weight was actually 60 pounds less than reported in the Journal. The newspaper article was based on incomplete personal medical records that were illegally delivered to the newspaper in violation of federal law, coming from a known group of Vegan and animal rights extremists.

Dr. Atkins' weight was consistently and frequently documented in the years and months prior to his fall; as he was suffering from cardiomyopathy, his health was monitored closely. Due to water retention, this robust 6-foot plus man, who competitively played tennis frequently during the week, had a weight that varied between 180 and 195. During his coma, as he deteriorated and his major organs failed, fluid retention and bloating dramatically distorted his body and left him at 258 pounds at the time of his death, a documented weight gain of over 60 pounds. How and why the Journal reported that he was obese, remains the only unanswered question in this pathetic situation.

Any implication that Dr. Atkins was obese or fat prior to his coma, shows a blatant disregard or even worse, lack of understanding of the medical facts surrounding this case, or of the physiology of severe heart failure and the degree of fluid retention that occurred during this hospitalization. None of us would expect the physicians at PCRM to reveal this in light of their past and their current motivation ... but surely as physicians they understood that this was not obesity, I guess it just didn't support the point they cared to convey ... so they chose to ignore it?

Source: Stuart Trager, M.D.
biz.yahoo.com

Why the Atkins backlash is just too difficult to swallow

From scotsman.com

As an Atkins dieter, or at least as someone who tries to limit my intake of bread, pasta, rice, cakes and biscuits, I’m used to scare stories. Almost every television programme or newspaper article on the subject tells me that the Atkins regime is bad. Last month the BBC reported that "doctors have expressed concern" that the Atkins diet - with its "high fat content" and "low vegetable intake" - could cause health problems. Just before Christmas I watched a documentary telling me that the Atkins diet was "against fruit and vegetables". People often ask me if I’m worried that I might give myself a heart attack.

Actually, I don’t think that avoiding chips, mashed potato, bagels, croissants and chocolate is likely to give me a heart attack. And if you read Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution you won’t see anything about avoiding green vegetables. But it comes as no surprise to see the media on the warpath again; this week, we are told, Atkins Nutritionals, the company behind the Atkins diet, has "changed tack", telling us that diets high in saturated fat can be risky. Can this be true? If you skim through this week’s papers, it seems as if even the Atkins organisation has become anti-Atkins.

However, it’s not true; the Atkins organisation has not changed tack. For a start, its diet is not just about eating bacon, sausages and steak. It’s about avoiding too much carbohydrate. Colette Heimowitz, director of research and education for Atkins Nutritionals, says: "The media and opponents of Atkins often sensationalise and simplify the diet as the all-the-steak-you-can-eat diet. This has never been true."

What is true, though, is that we are in the middle of an anti-Atkins backlash. People assume that, if it works, there must be something wrong with it. Atkins does work, for a very simple reason: carbohydrates, particularly refined carbohydrates, make you hungry. Think of a bread roll, or a helping of chips, as a line of cocaine. Eat some and soon you’ll want some more. Atkins says, "avoid the carbs". He does not say, "avoid the vegetables". Where you would normally eat chicken and chips with salad, on the Atkins diet you would replace the potatoes with a green vegetable such as spinach. And you’ll feel less hungry two hours later.

Why is the Atkins diet suddenly so popular? After all, low-carbohydrate diets have been around for ages. For one thing, Atkins feels contemporary; unlike most diets it’s not about being abstemious or counting calories. Men, who perform badly on most diets don’t mind Atkins. I keep meeting guys who say cutting carbs has changed their lives. My father, who could never eat small portions or count calories, lost three stone on Atkins.

It’s all to do with insulin. Carbohydrates tamper with the insulin in our bodies. They produce a lot of glucose, giving us a blood-sugar rush. But if you eat too many carbs your pancreas produces too much insulin; after a while, your blood-sugar rush will be followed swiftly by a blood-sugar crash. And low blood sugar produces cravings. This is what happens when you eat too many potatoes, or too much pasta or rice. It’s why Chinese meals leave people feeling hungry.

When I interviewed Dr Atkins last year, shortly before he died after slipping on a patch of ice outside his New York office, I was fat. I’m still overweight. But you should have seen me then. At slightly over 6ft tall, and 17 stone, I was fatter than I had ever been. My eating habits were getting more compulsive. I was hungry more or less all the time. I wanted to eat about six meals a day. Atkins told me that I was a typical victim of the Western diet. The problem with our culture, he said, was that we thought it was fat that was making us fat. But how could this be true? We’d been cutting our fat intake for 30 years and replacing it in our diet with "healthy" alternatives such as bread, potatoes, pasta and rice. And we’re fatter than we’ve ever been.

So I cut down on the carbs. I stopped being so hungry. Over the next year I lost more than two stone. And then the scare stories began. Too much fat, I kept reading, was going to kill me. But I wasn’t eating too much fat. Too much meat, I was told, would make me constipated. But it didn’t and I was also eating more green vegetables than ever - replacing potatoes and pasta with cabbage and broccoli. I was told that I would get bad breath if I ate no carbohydrates. But, in fact, I did eat small quantities of brown rice and wholegrain bread, which do not produce as much blood glucose as their refined equivalents, and my breath hasn’t suffered in the slightest.

Still, the backlash continues. I can see what’s happening. Food industry groups are worried that the Atkins diet will have an impact on jobs in their sectors. Potato consumption in Britain has reportedly fallen by four per cent since last year. And government bodies, such as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, would rather die than say anything against bread or potatoes. This week, a spokesman from the Food Standards Agency told dieters not to cut any food group from their diet. "It is about maintaining a balance," he said.

And that’s true, too. It is about maintaining a balance. But why are we one of the fattest nations on Earth? I think it’s because our idea of balance was wrong in the first place. We ate too much carbohydrate. Now we’re eating less and people are getting worried. But that doesn’t mean you have to stuff yourself with sausages and bacon every day. In the end, it all comes down to something quite simple. Eat your greens. Drink plenty of water. And don’t worry so much.

\•DR ATKINS believed that carbohydrates over-stimulate insulin production, causing hunger and leading to weight gain. He favoured the consumption of eggs, bacon, meat, seafood and dairy products.

What you can eat

Large amounts of proteins: beef, lamb, pork, bacon, veal, chicken, turkey, fish, shellfish, eggs, plus fats - oils, butter and mayonnaise.

• Limited amounts of fats and vegetables deemed to have some carbohydrate qualities: dark green, leafy and non-starchy vegetables such as spinach and broccoli, cheese, olives, avocado, cream, lemon and lime juice.

What you can’t eat

All other carbohydrates - bread, pasta, vegetables such as potatoes, pulses, pastry, refined sugars, caffeinated drinks and alcohol.

Source: scotsman.com

From the Atkins Newsletter

Your friends at Atkins® encourage you to click on the link below to view Dr. Stuart Trager’s interview on "Good Morning America," which aired on January 20th. Dr. Trager explains that Atkins has not changed its position on fat and refutes the report printed in last Sunday's The New York Times.

View the video clip

Atkins Research Update

Press Release Source: Atkins Health & Medical Information Services

Atkins Health & Medical Information Services Research Update
Monday January 12, 9:03 am ET
Controlled carbohydrate research from around the world

NEW YORK, Jan. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- As an ongoing service from Atkins Health & Medical Information Services to practicing physicians and medical and lifestyle journalists, our communications department provides the latest developments in clinical research on controlled carbohydrate nutritional practices and the Atkins Nutritional Approach™ (ANA) as they occur and are reported. If you would like any further information or access to our complete library of published controlled carbohydrate research, please contact Gina Mangiaracina at gmangiaracina@wwafsp.com. You can also find the complete library of published studies in The Science Behind Atkins section at www.atkins.com.

Press Release Source: Atkins Health & Medical Information Services
ATKINS NUTRITIONAL APPROACH SHOWN TO REDUCE EPILEPTIC SEIZURES

Although the efficacy of a low-calorie ketogenic diet in treating epilepsy without medications is well documented in the literature, maintaining the level of caloric restriction necessary to produce the needed level of ketosis is challenging. Specifically, these results are typically obtained by mimicking the effects of starvation--restricting a patient to a high-fat, low carbohydrate, low-protein diet that provides only 75 percent of the recommended caloric intake. Researchers believe that this Spartan regime controls seizures by creating ketone bodies in the blood, which are burned by brain cells in the place of glucose. Though primarily prescribed for children, this diet may be beneficial to adult epileptics as well.

Eric H. Kosoff, M.D., of Johns Hopkins, wondered whether the Atkins Nutritional Approach™ (ANA), which achieves ketosis by less severe means- restricting carbohydrates but not caloric intake-might be as effective in reducing seizures in patients with epilepsy. To test this hypothesis, the researchers put six epileptic patients at the Johns Hopkins Hospital of Neurology on the ANA. The patients, who were equally divided between male and female and ranged in age from 7 to 52 years old, had previously failed treatment with anticonvulsants.

In half the cases, the patients' seizures appeared to be controlled by the ANA. Given the small size of this study and the relatively short duration of seizure freedom observed, the researchers have not yet recommended Atkins as a replacement for the usual ketogenic diet in the treatment of epilepsy, claiming that larger studies are clearly needed.

In the meantime, the researchers suggest that patients awaiting in-house treatment with ketogenic diets may be put on the ANA, which has the additional virtue of having "an easily readable and widely available paperback" to test their ability to comply with a low carbohydrate diet (compliance can easily be checked by testing for ketosis) and its possible effectiveness.

Kossoff, Eric H., Krauss, Gregory L., McGrogan, Jane R., Freedman, John M. Efficacy the Atkins diet as therapy for intractable epilepsy. Neurology. In press.

FAT INTAKE DOES NOT INCREASE SERUM MARKERS FOR
ATHEROSCLEROSIS WHEN STARCH IS RESTRICTED

In an earlier study, while testing a dietary approach to controlling diabetes involving the replacement of starches by saturated fats, James Hays, M.D., and his colleagues at Christiana Health Services, Inc. in Newark, Delaware, were struck by the fact that patients following this diet lost weight with no apparent adverse effects on serum lipids.

To shed additional light on these intriguing findings, and to clarify issues relating to "the changing mix" of medications patients were receiving, these researchers embarked on a second study to look specifically at the effect of their high-fat, starch-avoiding diet on serum risk factors for atherosclerosis in a group of obese patients with established atherosclerosis.

Preliminary results of a six-week study involving 17 men and six women were encouraging: On average, participants lost 5 percent of their total body weight with no adverse effects on serum lipids, in fact, showing decreased fasting glucose, insulin and triglyceride levels.

This is remarkable in light of what the researchers call the "overwhelming evidence" that the addition of saturated fat to an otherwise low-fat diet leads to increased serum markers of atherosclerosis. The diet Dr. Hays and his colleagues arrived at to treat patients with chronic diabetes and atherosclerosis is similar to the ANA with regard to restricting carbohydrate intake rather than fat consumption. In Hays' study, half the calories came from saturated fat and protein from red meat, cheese, eggs. Carbohydrates were severely restricted. However, participants were prescribed a consistent calorie intake, as this was favored for the management of diabetes. According to Dr. Hays, "We have prescribed a consistent intake of certain fruits and vegetables rather than the Atkins step-wise approach, and this may have resulted in some other differences." As a result, only five of the participants in the study went into ketosis, a metabolic shift considered key to appetite control and weight loss in the ANA. In light of this, caloric restriction likely explains the observed weight loss, in contrast to that seen with a typical Atkins approach.

According to the researchers, these studies "suggest, but by no means prove, that long term compliance with a high-saturated fat, starch avoidance diet can result in continued weight loss without adverse effects on serum lipid levels."

James H. Hays, MD, Angela DiSabatino, RN, MS, Robert T. Gorman, PhD, Simi Vincent, PhD, MD, Michael E. Stillabower, MD, Effect of a High Saturated Fat and No-Starch Diet on Serum Lipid Subfractions in Patients With Documented Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease, Mayo Clin Proc, November 2003, Vol 78, pages 1331-1336.

LOW-FAT DIET INFLAMES FATTY LIVER

One frequent consequence of obesity is a condition known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), the accumulation of fat in the liver. NAFLD is a serious disease, which can lead to fibrosis or cirrhosis. Common sense would suggest that lowering dietary fat might benefit those with NAFLD. However, a recent study done at Johns Hopkins shows that this supposition is wrong, and that a low-fat diet can exacerbate the condition, leading to increased liver inflammation, while high-fat diets seem to reduce the inflammation.

In a paper presented at the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, Jeanne M. Clark, M.D., described her study in which she examined liver biopsies taken from 74 morbidly obese patients undergoing surgery for their obesity. Before the surgery, the patients filled in a 24-hour food recall questionnaire, which allowed the researchers to estimate the total calories, carbohydrates and fats in the patients' diets. Of the patients biopsied, 89 percent had fatty livers, 69 percent had inflammation and 41 percent had progressed to fibrosis. Clark found that compared to those patients with the lowest carbohydrate intake, those who ate a high carbohydrate diet had a seven-fold increased risk of liver inflammation. By some mechanism that is still a mystery, a high-fat diet seems to shield the fatty liver from damage.

HIGH-FAT DIETS MAY BE EFFECTIVE IN MANAGEMENT OF TYPE 2 DIABETES

The importance of diet in the management of Type 2, or adult onset, diabetes is universally acknowledged. Exactly what this diet should consist of is somewhat more controversial. Recently, physicians have been prescribing diets high in monounsaturated fats with a restricted amount of starches. The reasoning behind such diets is that, since dietary starches act like sucrose, if monounsaturated fats are substituted for these starches, control of blood sugar would improve. Now, a group of researchers has taken this idea one step further by totally eliminating dietary starch from the diet in exchange for an unlimited amount of saturated fat. To the researchers' surprise, the extra consumption of dietary cholesterol and saturated fat did not increase serum lipids, and patients not only lost more weight, but blood sugar also was better controlled.

The study compared 151 patients on the no-starch, unrestricted saturated fat diet, and 132 control patients following a diet that allowed unrestricted monounsaturated fats and a controlled amount of starch. The study was not randomized, and the varying cocktails of drugs consumed by the patients made analysis difficult, which the researchers admit clouded their conclusion that substituting saturated fat for starch leads to better control of diabetes. Still, they conclude in their article that, "the stark differences between the high-saturated fat plus starch-avoidance diet and the diet currently recommended by the ADA [American Diabetes Association] are disturbing. Nevertheless, this information needs widespread critical appraisal, not because it conclusively proves the superiority of a dietary prescription so much as it provides reason to question the relatively recent dietary prescription of high-carbohydrate diets to patients with diabetes mellitus."

James H. Hays, Robert T. Gorman, K.M.M. Shakir, Results of the use of Metformin and replacement of starch with saturated fat in diets of patients with type 2 diabetes, Endocrine Practice, 8 (3), pages 177-183.

LOW GLYCEMIC INDEX MEALS SATE HUNGER IN ADOLESCENTS

Despite a general reduction in fat consumption, one in five children are overweight. One hypothesis about why this is so is that children today consume more high-glycemic foods that quickly raise blood glucose levels, than in the past. To determine the effect of high-glycemic diets on children, University of Utah researchers fed 10 adolescents (5 boys, 5 girls) meals with either high- or low-glycemic index.

As expected, blood glucose and insulin levels were much lower after eating the low-glycemic index meals. More intriguing, however, was that after consuming a low-glycemic index meal, the adolescents waited longer (3.9 versus 3.1 hours) before requesting additional food, though they then ate as much as after a high-glycemic meal. The researchers speculate that this prolonged period of satiety might reduce the daily caloric intake of adolescents on a low-glycemic index diet and lead to long-term weight control.

Ball SD, Keller KR, Moyer-Mileur LJ, Ding YW, Donaldson D, Jackson WD., Prolongation of satiety after low versus moderately high glycemic index meals in obese adolescents, Pediatrics. 2003 Mar;111(3):488-94.

LOW CARBOHYDRATE DIET HAS POSITIVE EFFECT ON BLOOD LIPIDS

To investigate the effects of very low carbohydrate diets on the blood lipids and other markers of cardiovascular disease in women, investigators attempted to repeat work previously completed on male subjects, using female subjects. This balanced, randomized two-period crossover study looked at numerous serum markers in 10 healthy women who consumed both a low fat (<30%) and a very low carbohydrate (<10%) diet for four weeks each. Although modest increases were noted in LDL, favorable effects on cardiovascular disease risk status occurred by virtue of a relatively larger increase in HDL and a decrease in fasting and postprandial triglyceride levels.

Volek, J.S., Sharman, M.J., and Gomez A.L., et al., "An Isoenergetic Very Low Carbohydrate Diet Improves Serum HDL Cholesterol and Triacylglycerol Concentrations, the Total Cholesterol to HDL Cholesterol Ratio and Postprandial Lipemic Responses Compared with a Low Fat Diet in Normal Weight, Normolipidemic Women," The Journal of Nutrition, 133(9), 2003, pages 2756- 2761.

STUDY SUGGESTS DIETARY FAT INTAKE HAS LITTLE EFFECT ON STROKE

In a result that has confounded the expectations of physicians and medical researchers, scientists at Northwestern University and Harvard have shown that the amount of fat a person consumes apparently has no effect on stroke risk.

Northwestern University's Ka He, M.D,. and his colleagues at Harvard monitored a group of almost 44,000 male health care professionals for 14 years. The men periodically mailed in detailed questionnaires about their diets, lifestyles and medical histories. Men who initially reported cardiovascular disease or diabetes mellitus were excluded from the study. After analyzing the results, the researchers found that the total amount of fat consumed had no appreciable effect on the incidence of ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke. Diets rich in animal fat, vegetable fat, saturated fat, monounsaturated fat or trans fat were all equally benign with respect to stroke. The consumption of red meat, high-fat dairy products, nuts or eggs also was not related to the incidence of stroke.

Ka He, Anwar Merchant, Eric B Rimm, Bernard A Rosner, Meir J Stampfer, Walter C Willett, Alberto Ascheri, Dietary fat intake and risk of stroke in male US healthcare professionals: 14 year prospective cohort study, British Medical Journal, 23, pages 777-780.

CORONARY ARTERY CALCIUM, DIABETES AND METABOLIC SYNDROME

The amount of calcium deposited in the coronary arteries is a strong predictor of future fatal cardiac events in apparently healthy individuals. It is also known that people with diabetes or the metabolic syndrome, also known as Syndrome X, have an increased risk of cardiac disease. But until now the relationship between diabetes, the metabolic syndrome and coronary artery calcium has not been studied.

The metabolic syndrome is closely related to insulin resistance, which makes it related to, and possibly a precursor of, diabetes. People suffering from the metabolic syndrome have at least three of the following health issues: obesity, low HDL cholesterol, high triglycerides, glucose intolerance and high blood pressure. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, examined 1,823 patients, measuring their coronary artery calcium in addition to the various symptoms of metabolic syndrome and diabetes. They found that the more factors of the metabolic syndrome a patient had, the higher the coronary artery calcium. Similarly, diabetics also had an increase in coronary artery calcium, raising the need for further investigation as to the relationship between these findings and the risk of future cardiovascular events in the subset of individuals with metabolic syndrome or diabetes and coronary artery calcification.

Wong ND, Sciammarella MG, Polk D, Gallagher A, Miranda-Peats L, Whitcomb B, Hachamovitch R, Friedman JD, Hayes S, Berman DS., The metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and subclinical atherosclerosis assessed by coronary calcium, J Am Coll Cardiol. 2003 May 7;41(9):1547-53.

LOW CARB DIET EFFECTIVE IN SHORT-TERM TREATMENT OF OBESITY
IN SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN

With childhood obesity reaching epidemic proportions, physicians everywhere are looking for treatments that are effective. Doctors at the Marshall University School of Medicine in Huntington, West Virginia. report that 23 percent of their pediatric patients are obese. In an effort to find an effective treatment for these patients, they performed a small study comparing a low-fat, calorie-counting diet to a low carbohydrate, calorie-unrestricted diet.

The study consisted of 70 obese children divided into two groups. One was given a low-fat, hypocaloric diet whose calories consisted of 55 percent carbohydrates, 15-20 percent protein and less than 30 percent fat. The other group was put on a diet without calorie restriction that kept the carbohydrates to about 7 percent of the daily caloric intake, protein at 49 percent and fat at 44 percent. The result was that of the 47 children who completed the study with a minimum of two months of follow up, those on the low carbohydrate diet lost an average of 6 kilograms, with a decrease in body mass index of 2.6 kg/m2 compared to those on the low-fat diet, who gained an average of 4.6 kilograms and whose BMI increase by .8 kg/m2. While this study was small and the error bars large, the result does suggest that the low carbohydrate diet is indeed an effective treatment for juvenile obesity.

Misty Trent Strow, James R. Bailes, Adrian R. McGinnis, Lewis Spangler, Jr and Isabel Pino, Successful Short Term Treatment of Obesity in School-Age Children, West Virginia Chapter American Academy of Pediatric Residents Research Contest Winner, 2001.

COMPLEX CARBOHYDRATES, THE BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

Carbohydrates come in two basic varieties: sugars and starches. Sugars, also known as simple carbohydrates, are quickly absorbed by the body. Starches-complex carbohydrates-must first be broken down into simple carbohydrates before they are absorbed by the body. This difference can have an important effect on energy and appetite, as a recent study shows.

Researchers in the Netherlands fed 26 male subjects breakfasts high in simple carbohydrates one day and high in complex carbohydrates on the next. For the four hours following their meals, the researchers measured the subjects' blood glucose, insulin, triglycerides, free fatty acids and cholecystokinin levels. Following the simple carbohydrate breakfast, glucose and insulin levels were both higher at 30 minutes after feeding, triglyceride levels were higher at 180 minutes and free fatty acids were higher at 180 and 240 minutes. In addition, the subjects were asked to assess their satiety and levels of fatigue. The researchers found that those consuming a complex carbohydrate breakfast (whole grain breads and cereals) felt more energetic and less hungry than those who ate simple carbohydrates.

Pasman WJ, Blokdijk VM, Bertina FM, Hopman WP, Hendriks HF., Effect of two breakfasts, different in carbohydrate composition, on hunger and satiety and mood in healthy men, Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 2003 Jun;27(6):663-8.

Source: Atkins Health & Medical Information Services

Be Slim Without Dieting - Barry Groves Video out!

Your Perfect Weight Plan is a complete video guide to your slimmer, happier you. A 1 hour programme, packed with information and sample dishes to help you achieve Your Perfect Weight.

More information/order here: theperfectweight.com

A red-meat diet roams the earth once more

By Art Carey
Inquirer Columnist

In 1990, Jim Hays was a dietary hippie, a granola-gobbling, crypto-vegetarian disciple of Dean Ornish and his low-fat, high-carb cult.

Today, he is an out-of-the-closet carnivore, a meat-eating militant who advocates pigging out on plenty of fat and who regards sugar and starch as evil.

Nutritionally speaking, he has moved from Ralph Nader to Howard Dean to the right of Rush Limbaugh. Last month, he attended an Atkins convention and came away feeling betrayed.

"They've gone soft," he laments. "They're trying to be politically correct. They're peddling pre-packaged foods and permitting people to consume far too many carbs.

"I'm now more extreme than Dr. Atkins," Hays declares. "I totally believe the most important thing you can do for your overall health is to consume lots of saturated fat, particularly in the form of red meat."

Holy coronary thrombosis! Who is this guy? How did a nice boy from Kansas undergo such a radical transformation? Where did he get the nerve to contradict conventional wisdom and defy such pillars of the medical establishment as the American Diabetes Association and American Heart Association?

Hays, 48, is a physician who lives in Rosemont and practices in Wilmington. "Mild-mannered militant" may sound like an oxymoron, but it fits Hays. Soft-spoken and thoughtful, he backs his assertions with research and science.

At Christiana Care, the hospital and medical-research complex in Newark, Del., Hays has explored questions of diet and nutrition that have piqued his curiosity, challenged his assumptions, and resulted in published studies that have puzzled and provoked his colleagues.

His specialty is endocrinology, which is all about glands and hormones. Many of his patients are diabetic and dependent on insulin shots for survival. It was while trying to devise the best diabetic diet - one that would keep blood sugar low and help moderate blood-sugar spikes - that Hays made a discovery that upset the apple cart of orthodoxy.

Namely: Carbs are bad, fat is good.

In the early 1990s, Hays began shifting some of his obese patients from an Ornish-like diet to one similar to that recommended by Barry Sears of Zone Diet fame - high protein and moderate carb. Next, he began experimenting with an Atkins-like approach - high fat/high protein, extremely low carb.

The effect on his patients was amazing.

Not only did their blood sugar stabilize. Not only did they lose pounds and inches (though they weren't counting calories or exercising more). But their blood numbers also improved: total cholesterol, down; LDL cholesterol, down; triglycerides, way down. Hays was prepared to give some patients cholesterol-lowering meds; for most, it was unnecessary.

Since adopting a high-fat, low-carb diet, many of his overweight patients have shed 20 percent of their weight, and kept it off. Some have lost 100 pounds-plus, all while dining on fare that Hays describes as "a heart attack on a plate."

Consider what Hays eats when he's on the road. He'll stop at Mickey D's and order five double cheeseburgers. Then he throws away the buns and carefully scrapes off the ketchup (dastardly sugar!) and washes it all down with water.

At home, he eats only twice a day, and tries to consume 1 to 11/2 pounds of red meat per meal.

Why is fat so good? Besides making food taste better, Hays says, fat takes a while to digest, so it quells your stomach and suppresses appetite. Fat also prods your liver to make more bile, and bile is the garbage truck that hauls cholesterol out of the body.

Why are carbs so bad? First, they boost your blood sugar, which triggers a spurt of insulin. The more insulin in your blood, Hays says, the higher your risk of heart disease, and the more likely you are to be obese. Carbs stimulate the liver to make triglycerides, which lead to the nasty, sticky, artery-clogging kind of cholesterol.

Hallelujah! For years, I've been feeling guilty about all the "Grappler's Goulash" I ate as a high school wrestler. The recipe: Fry 3 pounds of ground beef. Pour off grease and sprinkle with a quarter-pound of shredded dried beef. Cover with eight to 10 slices of American cheese; when melted, mix until gooey. Salt to taste and smother with ketchup. Wash down with a half-gallon of whole milk.

"Sounds healthy to me," Hays said, "except the ketchup and milk."

The reason? Satanic sugar.

When it comes to sugar, Hays has zero tolerance. (You can't trust food labels, he gripes. Zero carbs doesn't always mean no carbs. The FDA allows wiggle room.) The only carbs he permits are those in fruits and vegetables offering essential nutrients. In his booklet, "Eat More Fat to Eat Fewer Calories," he calls sugary, starchy foods "candy," including baked beans, blueberries, beer, canned fruit, cereal, chili, cottage cheese, cream cheese, grapes, milk, oatmeal, pasta, pizza, rice and yogurt.

What about Spam?

"It's high fat," Hays said, "but like a lot of processed food, it contains sugar. People get into trouble, with both their weight and their heart, when they eat food that is both high in fat and high in sugar. A cheese omelet is OK. Spam and pancakes is a disaster."

"Body Language" appears Mondays in The Inquirer. Contact staff writer Art Carey at 215-854-4588 or acarey@phillynews.com. Contact Jim Hays at 302-633-1212 or welldrhays@aol.com.

Source: philly.com

UK food agonises over Atkins

Source: Telegraph

American food groups have gone low-carb crazy. So why arent British suppliers jumping on the bandwagon? Janet Bush reports

The craze for low carbohydrate eating, popularised by the Atkins diet, shows no sign of fading. But, as yet, the response of the British food industry has been resistance and even hostility. This is about to change. In an era of prohibitively tight margins, the Atkins market is growing too fast to ignore.

More than 3m Britons have bought the late Dr Robert Atkins' diet books. And research by the think-tank IGD finds that 23 per cent of women aged 25 to 33 are cutting down on the amount of carbohydrate they eat.

Those few retailers who sell low-carb products - many of them on the internet - report exponential demand. Joyce Edmonds runs Carblife Food. In July 2003, when the Atkins phenomenon was raging in the media, her website received 1.6m hits.

Richard Hunt, a butcher based in a farm shop near Stockport, has been making carb-free sausages for many years but was smart enough to label them as Atkins-friendly on his website, www.rickythebutcher.co.uk - sales are up 300 per cent over the past year.

However, both Edmonds and Hunt deride the failure of the British food industry to follow their lead. Edmonds has written repeatedly (without success) to the supermarket majors, urging them to meet the needs of the frustrated customers who visit her website.

She says: "It is a nightmare trying to source the products in this country. I have to import from the States - and that is so expensive for my customers. I have begged the supermarkets here to get their act together."

Hunt charges the food business with "trying to excise Atkins from the public's mind," because it has so much money tied up in highly profitable processed carbohydrates. "There is no margin in healthy food like eggs, fish and meat," he says. "They talk about balanced diets but they make their money from crisps, chocolates and sugar-laden ready meals. It's a huge con on the public."

The larger British food companies and the medical establishment seem united in their lack of of enthusiasm for low-carb. In the autumn of 2003, Dr Susan Jebb, the head of nutrition and health research at the Medical Research Council, dismissed high-fat, low-carbohydrate regimes as "a major health risk" and based on "pseudo-science".

Meanwhile, a typical food industry approach is that of Northern Foods - famous for supplying the supermarkets with ready-made meals - which says it has no plans to go low-carb and supports the Food Standards Agency's position on healthy eating through a balanced diet.

The major UK supermarket chains, none of whom cater specifically for the low-carb customer, routinely issue statements also extolling the virtues of a balanced diet and seem cagey when mention is made of Atkins.

The contrast with the US, where there are about 10m Atkins adherents, is stark. Barely a day goes by without a leading US food group launching a new low-carb product or rebranding its existing confections as in some sense Atkins friendly (KFC recently pulled a television advert which claimed its famous fried chicken was low-carb, after a complaint from the Center for Science in the Public Interest).

In America, low-carb products are offered in some 70,000 stores (and Home Bistro, an online retailer, will post you ready-made low-carb meals). Sales of low-carb products were an estimated $10bn (£5.65bn) last year, a 60 per cent rise from the previous year.

In an era of persistent obesity, figures from Mintel, the market researcher, show healthy sales growth for most weight control products. But Atkins Nutritionals - an offshoot of the Dr Atkins dietary clinic, whose sales are estimated at over $100m (£56.5m) - stands out with a 260 per cent rise between 2000 and 2002. Goldman Sachs and Parthenon Capital recently acquired a majority stake in this business for an estimated $700m.

So why are British retailers and food producers so wary of "Atkinising" their wares? Their caution seems odd, given the growing evidence that consumers are voting with their gullets.

Sales of wrapped and sliced bread have been falling, although John White, the director of the Federation of Bakers, says this is because of people switching to "premium" breads, not because bread is banned by Atkins.

Other losers from Atkins are more upfront about how worried they are. The National Potato Council (potatoes are an Atkins cardinal sin) launched a £1m campaign with the slogan "fab not fad" and held a British Potato to Work Week.

In an Atkins showdown, this coincided with British Egg Week (eggs are Atkins-friendly and sales have been rising by 4 per cent annually recently compared with the more usual 1 per cent growth). The National Fish Fryers' Association attacked the Atkins diet for undermining sales of fish and chips.

Jeffrey Hyman, the head of The Food and Drink Innovation Network, does not subscribe to the view that there is an industry conspiracy against Atkins.

He says that retailer caution is more likely to be based on the sheer cost of embracing new ranges and a genuine concern about whether the diet is healthy. "If we find some years down the line that low-carb dieting causes colon cancer, the supermarkets are going to look very silly indeed," he said. "But I still have no doubt that as soon as one of the majors gets into low carb, the others will follow in droves."

In fact, the British food majors are stealthily embracing Atkins. Heinz, which has launched 1-carb ketchup in the US, insists in its public statements that it has no plans to launch the same product in Britain. However, I understand that the product will be available here. And Heinz has just launched a low-carb version of its Smart Ones frozen meals because Atkins has undermined demand for its low-fat Weight Watchers brand.

As for Unilever, the UK's largest food group (which has admitted that sales of its Slimfast dieting brand have suffered because of Atkins), it has produced its own low-carb line in the US.

Among British supermarkets, the case of bashful Asda is intriguing. The subsidiary of the Wal-Mart colossus is stocking products from Atkins Nutritionals' new UK range in its in-house pharmacies from tomorrow, but did not wish to be cited at the Atkins British launch on December 17.

Wal-Mart is a major stockist of Atkins products in the US, so Asda's trailblazing is predictable. It is likely to expand from a small initial offering in its pharmacies to a broader range later this year.

Tesco is already stocking Michelob's "Ultra" low-carb beer. Although it says that it has no plans to stock a broader range of low-carb products, it has been talking to Atkins behind the scenes. Safeway says that it has no plans to stock "Atkins-specific diet products" but last month it added low-carb to its "less than" group of products.

Tamara Richardson, who is heading Atkins Nutritionals' UK launch (including shakes, bread mixes and breakfast bars), says the company will supply health stores initially - Asda's in-house pharmacies, Boots and Holland and Barrett among them - and only then move into supermarkets more broadly. This is the strategy it employed with spectacular success in the US.

This staged approach, she says, allows the company to "educate" the public about the science behind Atkins (actually, arming consumers against anti-Atkins propaganda) and build up production capacity. In the US, demand initially far outstripped the company's ability to roll out product and Atkins wants to avoid this problem in Britain.

Richardson is cautious about predicting the UK market's response: "It could be a slow burn; but we could see the phenomenal growth we experienced in the US," she says.

Either way, resistance from UK retailers is cracking and the bet must be that UK food producers will want to prevent Atkins building a long-term monopoly position in Britain. Unless they move fast and ambitiously with their own low-carb products, they may be too late.

Source: Telegraph

Spina bifida in babies is linked with cornflakes and white bread

By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent
(Filed: 23/11/2003)

Pregnant women who eat sugary or highly processed food such as white bread and cornflakes face double the risk of having malformed babies, according to new research.

Scientists made the discovery after comparing the diets of mothers whose babies had so-called neural tube defects such as spina bifida with those of mothers with normal babies.

The study, involving almost 1,000 women, found that the risk of such birth defects was substantially greater among those who consumed higher levels of sugar and the highly refined carbohydrates found in potatoes, white bread and rice and many popular breakfast cereals.

University researchers at the California birth defects monitoring programme in Berkeley said such foods may double the risk of neural tube defects in unborn babies, increasing to a fourfold risk among mothers with obesity.

The new findings, reported in the latest issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, add to the growing concern over food products with a high glycemic index (GI). By producing a surge in blood sugar, the foods trigger the release of a large amount of insulin, high levels of which have already been implicated in birth defects.

Dr Ross Welch, a specialist in foetal medicine at Arrowe Park Hospital, Wirral, Cheshire, said: "Assuming these results have a sound statistical basis, then this is important. The question we have to ask is what do we do about it?" Most mothers did not realise the crucial importance of diet in the first days of pregnancy, Dr Welch said.

"High blood sugar levels have already been linked with foetal abnormality in diabetes, and this new research seems to be in line with that." He added: "Preconceptual folic acid is, however, still likely to be more important."

The findings come amid mounting evidence that high GI foods may pose a significant threat to health. Earlier this year, high GI diets were linked to 50 to 80 per cent increases in risk of oral and ovarian cancer by researchers at the Centre for Cancer Research in Aviano, Italy.

Most concern focuses on the role of such food in obesity. Research published earlier this month by scientists at Oxford Brookes University found that children given a high GI breakfast of cornflakes, Coco-Pops or white bread consumed many more calories at lunchtime than those given a low-GI alternative, such as bran flakes or porridge.

Professor Jeya Henry, who led the research, said that the results supported evidence that high-GI foods boost appetite while cutting satiety - the "full" feeling that normally follows a meal. Both are thought to play important roles in developing obesity.

"It is time we got away from the idea that it is all just a matter of a lack of self-control and exercise," said Prof Henry. "Every measure to reduce food intake must be explored. If we are serious about this issue, we need the Government and the food industry to get together to fund more research as a matter of urgency."

Within the scientific world there is mounting anger over what is being seen as foot-dragging by the food industry over its role in the increase in obesity, which according to official figures is responsible for 30,000 premature deaths a year in Britain.

Neville Rigby, the policy director of the London-based international obesity task force, said: "The food industry is the solution - they have to be, but they are not doing enough." However,the food industry insists that the issues involved are complex. A spokesman for Kellogg's, which makes many high GI cereals, said: "The science is relatively new and in some areas controversial. For instance, simply adding milk to cornflakes lowers their GI, while adding a banana lowers it even further.

"There is very clear evidence that foods such as Kellogg's Corn Flakes, which are high in carbohydrate and low in fat, play an important role in helping people reduce fat intakes, maintain weight levels and possibly help their bodies to better control blood sugar levels."

Parents with children suffering from spina bifida welcomed the research. Su Scurr, from Tiverton, Devon, whose three-year-old daughter Briony has spina bifida, said last night: "If these foods are a significant factor then women need to be made aware of this research. I wouldn't wish what happened to me on anyone. It was awful. We found out that I was carrying a child with spina bifida in a scan at about 22 weeks.

"I took folic acid in the two months before I got pregnant and I made sure I ate lots of fruit and salads but in the past I had eaten quite a bit of sugar. Who doesn't eat cereals? We need more research into spina bifida."

Mrs Scurr, a full-time mother, who lives with her husband Peter, a chiropodist, Briony and two other - healthy - children, said abortion was not an option. "I have no regrets. Briony is lovely."

Tanni Grey-Thompson OBE, who was born with spina bifida and has become Britain's best-known paralympic athlete, said last night: "These findings are interesting but you have to put them into context. Living in areas with heavy industry is also a factor, for example. It is really useful to encourage women to eat a better diet but there are also financial reasons why women eat what they do."

Ms Grey-Thompson, who has won 14 paralympic medals and eight medal placings in the London Marathon, added: "There are a huge number of scary things that women are told when they become pregnant that can put a lot of guilt on mothers. Sometimes disability is no one's fault and there is nothing you can do about it."

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Benefits of fewer carbs

Eating less of them may lower levels of bad cholesterol.

By Jane E. Allen, LA Times Staff Writer

Overweight people are constantly being advised to take off the pounds. Failing that (and they often do), they might improve their health by limiting carbohydrates. That simple dietary change can lower levels of a particularly bad form of cholesterol linked to heart disease.

A study of moderately overweight men found that even without cutting calories, the fewer carbohydrates they ate, the lower the blood levels of what's called "small, dense low-density lipoprotein."

Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol is known as bad cholesterol. Among many subtypes of LDL, however, small, dense LDL is considered especially damaging to arteries (it's more likely to get into the artery wall and trigger plaque buildup).

Having lots of small, dense LDL, low levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL or good cholesterol) and elevated triglycerides (another fat in the blood), is strongly linked to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes and heart disease.

Dr. Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, studied 178 men who were on the path to becoming obese and diabetic. One group followed a 55% carbohydrate diet, approximating what most Americans eat. A second group ate 40% carbohydrates. A third group slashed carb intake to 25%; half of this group ate a diet heavy in the saturated fats found in meats and dairy foods, while the other half was encouraged to eat more monounsaturated fats, such as olive oil.

The 40%-carb group experienced a significant benefit in reduced small, dense LDL, Krauss told colleagues two weeks ago at the American Heart Assn. Scientific Sessions in Orlando, Fla. Restricting carbs to 25% brought further improvement, regardless of whether patients ate saturated or monounsaturated fats.

Unlike the Atkins diet, which virtually eliminates carbs, the test subjects were given more realistic carb reductions. For three weeks, they were told to maintain their weight while limiting carbs. Then for five weeks, everyone cut 1,000 calories a day. All the men lost weight and reduced bad cholesterol, but those on the 25% carb diet already had gotten big reductions in the bad cholesterol before cutting calories. The others' cholesterol dropped once they cut calories.

Carolyn Berdanier, a University of Georgia nutritionist, said that carb reductions might not have the same effect on everyone because of genetic differences.

Source: latimes.com

High saturated fat, starch avoidance weight loss diet offers good preliminary results

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- In the quest for an effective weight loss diet that also is nutritionally complete, researchers in the November issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings report preliminary weight loss results of a regimen that is similar to the Atkins diet that are encouraging, but merit further, broader study.

Researchers from Cardiology Research at Christiana Care Health Services, Inc., in Newark, Del., report patients on a high saturated fat and avoidance of starch diet similar to the Atkins diet experienced 5 percent weight loss after six weeks without adverse effects. The Atkins diet is noted for its high-fat and carbohydrate restrictions, which have been shown to result in weight loss.

James Hays, M.D., of the Christiana Care Health Services, Inc. the primary investigator, said the study came about after researchers noted that patients with atherosclerosis or diabetes were also experiencing weight loss with a diet they were prescribing for treatment of the chronic disease.

"For the last eight years, we have been concentrating on dietary treatment of the chronic diseases diabetes and atherosclerosis and have ended up prescribing to patients a diet high in saturated fat much like what Dr. Atkins has advocated for weight loss," Dr. Hays says. "A consistent calorie intake is helpful in treatment of diabetes, so we have prescribed a consistent intake of certain fruits and vegetables rather than Dr. Atkins' step-wise approach and this may have resulted in some other differences."

Although further studies remain to be done, it might be possible to find an optimum diet that results in weight loss, promotes longevity and contains a lot of saturated fat, Dr. Hays said. The Atkins diet relies on ketosis, the decrease in appetite related to the caloric intake. However no long-term studies have determined whether there is a risk of cardiovascular disease.

Others who contributed to the study include Angela DiSabatino; Robert Gorman, Ph.D.; Simi Vincent, Ph.D., M.D.; and Michael Stillabower, M.D., all of Christiana Care Health Services.

The observational study looked at 17 men and six women who self-reported food intake and each lost 5 percent of their body weight in six weeks, Dr. Hays said. The diet prescribed for patients by the physicians was to consume one half of all calories as saturated fat, primarily as red meat and cheese. Eggs and other low-fat forms of protein were allowed, regardless of cholesterol content. Fresh fruit and non-starchy vegetables were prescribed in restricted amounts at each meal. Starch was forbidden.

In an editorial in the same issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Gerald Gau, M.D., of Mayo Clinic's Division of Cardiovascular Diseases and Internal Medicine, writes that researchers should keep an open mind about the Atkins diet and continue to study its metabolic effects.

With this published study, Dr. Gau notes that long-term follow-up and larger numbers of patients are needed for more definitive information. Dr. Gau writes that other diets that restrict calories should also be studied for their risks and benefits.

###

Mayo Clinic Proceedings is a peer-reviewed and indexed general internal medicine journal, published for more than 75 years by Mayo Clinic, with a circulation of 130,000 nationally and internationally.

John Murphy
507-284-5005 (days)
507-284-2511 (evenings)
e-mail: newsbureau@mayo.edu

Source: EurekAlert

Diet for Obese Patient Tied to Liver Inflammation

"Compared with patients with the lowest carbohydrate intake, those on a high-carbohydrate diet had a seven-fold increased risk of liver inflammation. A high-fat diet appeared to be protective, with those in the highest fat intake group having a very low increased risk of inflammation."

Read full article: Reuters

Center for low-carbohydrate diet closes

NEW YORK (AP) _ The Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine has closed its doors, six months after low-carbohydrate diet guru Dr. Robert C. Atkins died at age 72.

The center was shuttered on Oct. 15, and patients were notified two weeks earlier.

Dr. Keith Berkowitz, a specialist in internal medicine and the center's acting director, announced Wednesday that he would open his own practice later this month that would continue Atkins's philosophy for good health.

Read full article: newsday.com

Low Carb Shifts Into High Gear

The Fairway supermarket in Plainview is bustling with shoppers on a recent Sunday afternoon. Smack in the middle of the sprawling store are displays of diet foods bulging with low-carbohydrate products of the most unlikely kinds: Bagels, bread mixes, cake mixes, candies, crackers, pancake syrups, salad dressings, cereals -- even chips and beer -- all seemingly forbidden foods for the growing legion of low-carb dieters.

In fact, by one count, there are now more than 800 products that mimic the very foods that dieters are supposed to avoid. Low-carb dieters, who until now have been content to stuff their gullets with steak and bacon and eggs, now can have their cake and avoid it, too...

Read full article: newsday.com

The burning question

Yet another study has shown that the Atkins Diet works, but even the scientist in charge is baffled as to why the low-carb regime rduces fat more effectively than low-calorie eating plans. Robert Matthews reports

As an academic nutritionist at the University of Cincinnati, Dr Bonnie Brehm is at the cutting edge of research into the biggest question to hit her field in decades: does the Atkins diet work?

Most nutritionists faced with the torrent of anecdotal evidence for its effectiveness have simply parroted the mantra that more research is needed, while muttering darkly about possible long-term health effects. Dr Brehm and her colleagues, in contrast, have spent the past few years actually doing the research, and will unveil their findings at the American Dietetic Association's annual meeting next week.

They have been studying the effectiveness of the Atkins diet in scientific trials involving people classed as clinically obese, implying a weight of more than 14.5 stone in a person 5ft 9in tall. Now the latest results are in - and it looks like vindication for the late Dr Robert Atkins, whose diet books have sold 15 million copies over 30 years.

According to Dr Brehm, those following Atkins's low-carbohydrate diet for four months achieved twice the weight loss of those on a conventional calorie-controlled, low-fat diet. Furthermore, the team found no evidence of harmful effects from following the diet - at least over the timescale of the study.

These results are in line with those found in similar small studies now starting to emerge. As well as backing the claims made for the Atkins diet, these latest results seem to further undermine standard nutritional advice about the need to focus on cutting fat and calories. They are certainly something of an embarrassment to Dr Brehm, whose research is funded by the American Heart Association, which has long advocated calorie-controlled, low-fat diets.

As a scientist, Dr Brehm puts unearthing the truth above pleasing her paymasters - but it is this that is causing her most concern. She is having problems explaining her findings - and in the increasingly vociferous debate over the Atkins diet, that may well land her in a lot of trouble at next week's meeting.

The scientific world is becoming increasingly polarised in its views over the diet, with researchers such as Dr Brehm being given a tough time over their apparent support for what some scientists believe is the nutritional equivalent of crystal therapy. At the heart of the controversy is the science behind the Atkins diet - first published 30 years ago - and whether it is really anything more than a collection of buzzwords.

Conventional wisdom dictates that calories are the key to weight loss, and so those who lose weight must simply be consuming fewer calories than they burn up. Yet according to Dr Brehm, the obese people who lost weight on the Atkins diet ate and burned up essentially the same number of calories as those on the standard diet. What was very different was the proportion of body fat shed by each group, which mirrored their percentage weight loss. On the face of it, this backs the central claim of the Atkins diet: that a low-carb diet turns the body into a "fat-burning machine".

To trigger this effect, Atkins dieters are instructed to begin by eliminating all but 20 grams of carbohydrates from their diet for a fortnight, forcing their bodies to get energy by burning up fat reserves instead. The result is supposed to be weight loss, plus the production of compounds known as ketones; the higher the level of "ketosis", the more fat is being burned.

That is the theory. Yet studies of the patients in Dr Brehm's trial failed to reveal a connection between ketosis and fat loss. "We didn't see any correlation - all of our expectations were confounded," she told The Sunday Telegraph. "I'm hoping someone in the audience might have some answers."

Dr Brehm is confident that there is a reasonable - if not simple - explanation for her findings: "In the end, the energy in has got to match the energy out," she says.

Still more baffling is why there are such huge gaps in knowledge about how humans respond to diet. The past 20 years has seen obesity reach record levels in the UK, with more than 20 per cent of adults now classified as clinically obese. According to the National Audit Office, obesity is responsible for 30,000 premature deaths each year - more than 50 times the number of Aids-related deaths in the UK.

Such statistics have led scientists to concede that the standard advice on nutrition and healthy eating has been an abject failure. Even so, official sources such as the British Nutrition Foundation continue to promote the standard high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet. Meanwhile, the Atkins diet is officially dismissed as a "fad" by the British Dietetic Association, with leading nutritionists insisting that there is insufficient scientific evidence to go on.

This lack of evidence has not deterred many in the medical profession from condemning the diet out of hand. Last week a poll of GPs revealed that one in four would advise their patients to stay fat rather than try the Atkins diet - despite the proven life-threatening effects of obesity.

According to some, such attitudes suggest that the scientific world is in the grip of cognitive dissonance over the Atkins diet, preferring to ignore whatever evidence it does not like. Professor Eric Westman, a clinical trials expert at Duke University, North Carolina, and author of a forthcoming study of the evidence for and against the Atkins diet, says: "It is making people re-examine dogma - and it's not always appreciated."

According to the review, to appear in Current Atherosclerosis Reports, studies to date show that the Atkins diet does produce weight loss over six months, without obvious health effects. And contrary to the claims of many nutritionists, there is even evidence that it may be healthier than the standard diet. Despite its promotion of fat and eggs, studies suggest that the diet may boost levels of the healthy forms of cholesterol.

Prof Westman thinks that this unexpected effect may explain a long-standing mystery surrounding heart disease. In the late 1980s, researchers began investigating the unusually low rates of heart attacks and stroke among Eskimo communities in Greenland. Until now, the explanation was thought to lie in their diet of oily fish. Yet attempts to reduce heart disease using supplements of fish oil extracts proved disappointing. Prof Westman says the studies of the Atkins diet point to another explanation: that the lo-carb diet forced on the Inuit by their environment gives them higher levels of healthy forms of cholesterol, proven to cut heart disease risk.

Despite this, Prof Westman cautions anyone with a medical condition against rushing onto a low-carb diet. "The problem is that it works too well," he explains. "The diet can cause insulin levels to drop by 50 per cent in one day, so diabetics could find themselves over-medicated. It's the same for those with high blood pressure."

Even so, Prof Westman believes that the results to date are impressive enough to warrant an intensive research effort on the Atkins diet: "We're in a period when we will learn a lot."

It is not a prospect that thrills the whole nutrition science community. Prof Westman has been personally vilified for conducting research with financial support from the Atkins Foundation - despite the fact that some vocal critics of the diet, such as Dr Susan Jebb, the head of nutrition at the UK Medical Research Council, have received funding from bodies such as the Flour Advisory Bureau.

Dr Brehm has also run into resistance even over her research findings that were funded by the American Heart Association. "We had a tough time getting our results published - it took 18 months altogether," she said. "The big journals really couldn't handle it. But we're not endorsing the diet, it's just our results."

What both sides do agree on is the paucity of scientific evidence on the long-term benefits and health effects of the Atkins diet. With the world-wide obesity problem now claiming an estimated two million adult lives a year, Dr Brehm believes that the time has come to commit serious resources to studies of low-carb diets. She said: "We need much more doing - and doing quickly."

It is a sentiment endorsed by Professor Tom Sanders, the director of the Nutrition, Food and Health Research Centre at King's College, London - and a sceptic of the Atkins diet. "The evidence is that it's the calorie intake that counts," said Prof Sanders. "But in the end, diets don't work because people don't follow them. We need large scale, randomised controlled trials of treatments of obesity running for one to two years."

Those already embarked on such research suspect that it will take a great deal to overcome the visceral response the mere mention of Atkins provokes among academics. Says Dr Brehm: "A lot of people just want to hold on to what they learned in college."

Source: telegraph.co.uk

The woman trying to persuade Britain to swallow the Atkins diet

Figure-conscious stars give wrong message, says nutritionist on a mission. Celia Hall reports

Colette Heimowitz is a woman with a fight on her hands. The battleground is the epidemic of obesity in the western world and her sword is the controversial Atkins diet.

If Ms Heimowitz has any anxiety about the level of fury raised in the breasts of doctors who oppose the Atkins way of eating, she shows no sign of it.

"I am on a mission and my mission is to change the way the world eats," she said with conviction on a visit to London yesterday.

Read full article: telegraph.co.uk

New Study Suggests Calories May Not Count

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- One of the most controversial aspects of low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins Nutritional Approach™ is their rejection of the tyranny of calorie counting. Critics of these plans claim that the reason people lose weight on low-carb diets is the same reason they lose weight on any other diet: they actually consume fewer calories, presumably because they are bored with monotony of all that steak. Now, a new study by Harvard researchers suggests that these critics are wrong and that people lose at least as much weight on a low-carbohydrate diet than those on a low-fat diet, even when they consume significantly more calories every day.

Last May two studies were published in the New England Journal of Medicine that showed the benefits of low-carbohydrate diets, but they left some open questions. "Some people have argued that if there is a difference between low- fat and low-carb diets as some studies have shown, it's due to caloric restriction because people are either bored and thus eat less or people are satiated and thus eat less," says Penelope Greene, a nutritionist at the Harvard School for Public Health and chief author of the new study. "My own view is that if it's boring then that's a particular concern, because that's not a diet that can be maintained. If it's caloric restriction because it's satiating and people are happy, I'm not sure that that's necessarily a bad thing. That seems like a good thing."

To prove that something more than mere caloric restriction is the reason that low-carb diets work, Greene and her colleagues had to improve on the previous "free-feeding" studies. In these experiments, subjects were randomly divided into two groups, and told to follow either a low-fat or a low-carb diet on their own. The researchers did not know how much the subjects actually consumed, which meant that it was possible that the low-carb eaters were leaving food uneaten on their plates. Greene and her colleagues, Walter Willett, Juniper Devicis and Antoine Skaf set out to perform a more carefully controlled, controlled-feeding experiment in which the subjects would be given prepared meals with portions weighed to the nearest gram.

Controlled-feeding experiments are notoriously difficult, Greene explains. "A lot of people didn't think we could do this," she says. After running the pilot study, which consisted of 21 subjects, she understands why. For several months she was putting in 10- to 15-hour days, seven days a week, supervising food preparation, color coding meals, and keeping records. The researchers contracted out the preparation of the food to an upscale Italian restaurant in Cambridge, MA, Ristorante Marino. "They were very used to doing catering," she says, "but not in weighing food to the nearest gram." Furthermore, they had to produce two different preparations of most foods -- low-fat and low-carb -- at five different calorie levels.

The pilot study, which was performed last fall, consisted of three sets of seven subjects each. "This was a very motivated group," Greene explains. "They were all over-fifty, overweight and overly scared. We had hundreds of people who wanted to enroll." The subjects would pick up their meals every evening and return the uneaten portion from the previous day. "There was very, very little of that," Greene says. "What I got back were little dregs of lettuce, literally."

The first group was fed a low-fat diet, consisting of 1,500 calories a day for women and 1,800 calories a day for men. The second group was given a low-carbohydrate diet, but the same number of calories. To test the hypothesis that the weight loss is not due to caloric restriction, the third group was also fed a low-carb diet, but 1,800 calories a day for women and 2,100 calories a day for men. Over the 12-week course of the study this group consumed 25,000 extra calories. According to many diet books, 3,500 calories equals one pound, which means that the third group should have lost 7 pounds less than the other two groups. In fact, to within statistical error the subjects in all three groups lost more or less the same weight. "I think this was the most surprising thing, and made this very much worth doing," Greene said. "Keep in mind that there are people who would have argued that the second group should have not done as well because of all the fat they ate."

Greene is quick to point out that this was only a pilot study, though "probably the most elaborate pilot study I have ever heard of. The purpose of the experiment was to see if under these controlled conditions there was really anything to warrant a larger study. And the answer is yes, certainly."

Source: Yahoo

Low-Carb Diets Are Working, Study Says

By DANIEL Q. HANEY, AP Medical Editor

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - The dietary establishment has long argued it's impossible, but a new study offers intriguing evidence for the idea that people on low-carbohydrate diets can actually eat more than folks on standard lowfat plans and still lose weight.

Perhaps no idea is more controversial in the diet world than the contention — long espoused by the late Dr. Robert Atkins — that people on low-carbohydrate diets can consume more calories without paying a price on the scales.

Over the past year, several small studies have shown, to many experts' surprise, that the Atkins approach actually does work better, at least in the short run. Dieters lose more than those on a standard American Heart Association plan without driving up their cholesterol levels, as many feared would happen.

Skeptics contend, however, that these dieters simply must be eating less. Maybe the low-carb diets are more satisfying, so they do not get so hungry. Or perhaps the food choices are just so limited that low-carb dieters are too bored to eat a lot.

Now, a small but carefully controlled study offers a strong hint that maybe Atkins was right: People on low-carb, high-fat diets actually can eat more.

The study, directed by Penelope Greene of the Harvard School of Public Health and presented at a meeting here this week of the American Association for the Study of Obesity, found that people eating an extra 300 calories a day on a very low-carb regimen lost just as much during a 12-week study as those on a standard lowfat diet.

Over the course of the study, they consumed an extra 25,000 calories. That should have added up to about seven pounds. But for some reason, it did not.

"There does indeed seem to be something about a low-carb diet that says you can eat more calories and lose a similar amount of weight," Greene said.

That strikes at one of the most revered beliefs in nutrition: A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. It does not matter whether they come from bacon or mashed potatoes; they all go on the waistline in just the same way.

Not even Greene says this settles the case, but some at the meeting found her report fascinating.

"A lot of our assumptions about a calorie is a calorie are being challenged," said Marlene Schwartz of Yale. "As scientists, we need to be open-minded."

Others, though, found the data hard to swallow.

"It doesn't make sense, does it?" said Barbara Rolls of Pennsylvania State University. "It violates the laws of thermodynamics. No one has ever found any miraculous metabolic effects."

In the study, 21 overweight volunteers were divided into three categories: Two groups were randomly assigned to either lowfat or low-carb diets with 1,500 calories for women and 1,800 for men; a third group was also low-carb but got an extra 300 calories a day.

The study was unique because all the food was prepared at an upscale Italian restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., so researchers knew exactly what they ate. Most earlier studies simply sent people home with diet plans to follow as best they could.

Each afternoon, the volunteers picked up that evening's dinner, a bedtime snack and the next day's breakfast and lunch. Instead of lots of red meat and saturated fat, which many find disturbing about low-carb diets, these people ate mostly fish, chicken, salads, vegetables and unsaturated oils.

"This is not what people think of when they think about an Atkins diet," Greene said. Nevertheless, the Atkins organization agreed to pay for the research, though it had no input into the study's design, conduct or analysis.

Everyone's food looked similar but was cooked to different recipes. The low-carb meals were 5 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein and 65 percent fat. The rest got 55 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein and 30 percent fat.

In the end, everyone lost weight. Those on the lower-cal, low-carb regimen took off 23 pounds, while people who got the same calories on the lowfat approach lost 17 pounds. The big surprise, though, was that volunteers getting the extra 300 calories a day of low-carb food lost 20 pounds.

"It's very intriguing, but it raises more questions than it answers," said Gary Foster of the University of Pennsylvania. "There is lots of data to suggest this shouldn't be true."

Greene said she can only guess why the people getting the extra calories did so well. Maybe they burned up more calories digesting their food.

Dr. Samuel Klein of Washington University, the obesity organization's president, called the results "hard to believe" and said perhaps the people eating more calories also got more exercise or they were less apt to cheat because they were less hungry.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Medical Editor Daniel Q. Haney is a special correspondent for The Associated Press.

Source: yahoo.com

Farming lobby 'pushed for warnings on Atkins diet'

By Charlotte Edwardes
(Filed: 05/10/2003)

Nutritionists have accused US government health officials of issuing "groundless" warnings against the Atkins diet because they are influenced excessively by the farming lobby.

A high-powered committee of food specialists said that official warnings were driven by farmers who wanted to protect their sales of wheat. The nutritionists told an American Senate hearing last week that the public was being "misled" over what constitutes a healthy diet.

The hearing was called to revise official guidelines on diet. The seven-strong panel of specialists agreed that the principle of eating more protein and fewer carbohydrates - the foundation of the Atkins diet - would reverse the rapid increase in obesity in America and Britain. Two-thirds of Americans and half of Britons are overweight or obese.

The controversy in America follows the disclosure two months ago that a British nutritionist who was one of the diet's fiercest critics was in the pay of the flour lobby.

The nutritionists told the hearing in Washington that "low-fat" diets were devised by people linked to the grain and potato industry in an attempt to drive weightconscious consumers towards their products. In fact, the nutritionists said, these diets make people fatter.

Official guidelines drawn up 10 years ago by America's Department of Agriculture for use in schools and hospitals recommend six to 11 servings of carbohydrates, such as bread, pasta, sugars and potatoes a day (one serving is the equivalent of one slice of bread) and very few saturated fats.

Senator Peter Fitzgerald, who chaired the committee, said: "Putting the Department of Agriculture in charge of dietary guidelines is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse."

Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was also on the committee that met for three hours on Tuesday, added: "Looking at some of the recommendations from the Department of Agriculture gives the idea that they've forgotten that we are feeding people, not horses."

The Atkins diet, which has 15 million followers in the United States and three million in Britain, stipulates a high concentration of protein and fat, such as eggs, meat and cheese, and a reduced intake of carbohydrates.

Among its devotees are Hollywood actors such as Jennifer Aniston, Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta Jones.

The diet has come under fire from officials on both sides of the Atlantic who claim that it can cause the onset of diabetes, cancer, kidney failure, bone disorders, constipation and other health complications.

Two months ago Dr Susan Jebb, one of Britain's leading nutrition experts, condemned the diet, saying that highprotein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate regimes were "a major health risk" and based on "pseudo-science".

She recommended exercise and a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet as the best solution to Britain's obesity crisis.

Later, however, Dr Jebb, who is the head of nutrition and health research at Britain's Medical Research Council (MRC), was found to have accepted a £20,000 grant for the MRC from the Flour Advisory Bureau - the lobbying and consumer arm of the National Association of British and Irish Millers - to conduct its research.

Other lobby groups have been more transparent in their criticism of the regime. Last week the Atkins diet was blamed for a slump in the sales of fish and chips. The National Fish Fryers' Association attacked the diet and called on the public to back traditional food.

A spokesman said: "It would be an absolute tragedy to see one of the UK's most important trademarks slip into a decline because of a shortlived diet fad. Not only are potatoes great for energy, they are low in salt, virtually fat-free, cholesterol-free and provide important vitamins and minerals."

Dr Stuart Lawrence Trager, the clinical assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, who is also a consultant at the Atkins Centre for Complementary Medicine in New York, said that the myth that something "fat-free" was good was part of the problem and that the public needed re-educating. "People have been led to believe that all carbohydrates are good for them and that to eat an unlimited diet of them is healthy. People are told that fat is bad.

"They go home and eat low-fat crisps, cookies and muffins that may have hundreds of calories and be loaded with simple sugars but have very little fat. People think they can have fizzy drinks with tablespoons of sugar and unlimited bread. It's a mixed message and this advice contributes to obesity."

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Dr. Atkins' Medical Practice Closes

Press Release
Source: Atkins Health and Medical Information Services

Dr. Atkins' Medical Practice Closes; Clinical Legacy Lives on Through The Dr. Robert C. Atkins Foundation and Atkins Nutritionals, Inc.

NEW YORK, Oct. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- The medical practice of Dr. Robert C. Atkins, who passed away earlier this year, will be closing its doors on October 15. Also known as The Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine, the practice has been in the process of winding down for the past few months as required by New York State law. Arrangements are underway for the transfer of records and the notification to patients.

Read full article: yahoo.com

Low carb, big business

Firms are scrambling to cash in on diet trend

By Mike Ivey
September 25, 2003

Sara Dobbs lifted her small basket of groceries onto the checkout counter at Copps Food Center on Whitney Way.

In it: a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon, several cans of tuna and bottled water.

Low carb? You bet.

"So far it's working for me," said Dobbs, 32, a graduate student at the UW-Madison. "We'll see if I can stick with it."

If it seems like everybody and their sister are on a low-carb kick, it's probably because they are.

More than 80 percent of American adults now claim to follow some sort of low-carbohydrate diet, according to a new survey from the Supermarket Guru, a national grocery service...

Read full article: madison.com

McTygue owes his weight loss to Atkins diet

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- Public Works Commissioner Tom McTygue firmly believes people have control over their own health. And about seven months ago, he decided to take control of his weight problem by going on the Atkins diet.

McTygue lost about 40 pounds, going from a 44 to a 38 waist, and hopes to close in on his goal of a 36 waist within the month. But he also dropped more than pounds and pant sizes -- McTygue improved his health so much he was able to go off a medication for heart regulation and blood pressure.

Read full article: The Saratogian

BBC - Government wades into Atkins row

Advice on a government website suggests that high-fat, low carbohydrate diets - such as Atkins - may increase the risk of cancer and heart disease.

The Food Standards Agency says that high-fat diets are linked to obesity - and "unpalatable and dull".

Read full article: bbc.co.uk

Sight for sore eyes

A diet rich in carbohydrates results in poor eyesight. Dr John Briffa takes a look at the evidence

Sunday September 21, 2003
The Observer

Among those who know me well I have a reputation as a bit of a philistine. In my 37 years on this planet, I've read just two novels and didn't even open the set texts for my English literature O level (which I failed). The truth is, I've always struggled taking in the written word, and view the expression 'reading for pleasure' as a contradiction in terms. With such a studious aversion to reading matter, I remember feeling rather hard-done-by to find myself short-sighted and in need of glasses at the age of 13. My own experience did seem to be one in the eye for the notion that short-sightedness is the result of bookishness.

Recently, I decided to research the causes of short-sightedness (myopia). Populations with no system of formal education have very low rates of myopia (typically 0-2 per cent). This is in stark contrast to Westernised cultures, where virtually everyone is put through the mill of education, and short-sightedness afflicts between 25 and 35 per cent of people. However, other evidence suggests that the link between reading and myopia is not as clear as it may seem.

Read full article: The Observer

Eat fat, get slim: recipes for Atkins dieters

Henry Harris, chef at Racine and an Atkins dieter himself, begins a four-week series of the recipes which have helped him to lose weight

• Peppered steak with Cognac
• Veal cheeseburger in a mushroom bun
• Rabbit with mustard sauce and bacon

Week one: meat

In the past four months I have lost two stones. Before now I had always avoided diets: they never really fitted in with my life as a chef, and my self-will and desire to change were negligible. Then my wife went on the Atkins diet and started looking fabulous and feeling great. As she also seemed to be eating very well, I thought I'd give it a go - once I had devised recipes tailored towards Dr Atkins's regime. Over the next four weeks I will be sharing some of these with you.

Given that Dr Atkins New Diet Revolution outsells almost everything bar Harry Potter, you are probably familiar with the basic rules of the Atkins diet, which are pretty simple: give up carbohydrates and sugars. So no bread, potatoes and other carbs, and no to most fruit as it contains sugar. But yes to protein, fat and lots of vegetables. (Obviously, it is a little more complicated than this. If you want to follow the diet, I do advise buying a copy of the book - and exercise is vital.)

But, while my wife's example was tempting, I'm afraid I couldn't come to terms with the recipes contained in Dr Atkins's book itself (I do not want to cook with tinned salmon, use soy flour to make a low-carb pizza dough, or bake with artificial sugar). So for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine I have devised a series of recipes that should appeal to the food lover as much as to the dieter.

This week's three meat dishes are rabbit with bacon and a creamy mustard sauce - quite filling enough without spuds. A succulent veal 'burger' dripping with good cheese, but no bread bun. And finally, my desert-island dish, steak au poivre. Do I miss the pile of pommes frites that used to sit on the side? Not a bit; that sliver of roquefort alongside my large green salad is even better.

To the recipes: telegraph.co.uk

'Atkins Tax' would help reduce obesity problem, says expert

A LEADING academic will this week call for a tax on high-carbohydrate foods in an effort to reduce obesity and cut the burden on the National Health Service.

Dr Jim Logan claims humans store fat naturally as part of the genetic make-up we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This tendency, combined with our less active lifestyles, means we are prone to obesity and many other health problems such as Type 2 diabetes, he says.

Dr Logan, a physiologist with a particular interest in metabolism, says a lack of action will result in more fat-related illness and the NHS being swamped in future. But, he claims, a carbohydrate tax would put people off eating sweet or high-fat foods and raise extra money for health care.

Full article: thescotsman.co.uk

Flour industry bread funds Atkins diet critic

ANDREW MURRAY-WATSON AND TOM CURTIS

WHEN Dr Susan Jebb, one of Britain’s leading nutrition experts, condemned the hugely popular protein-based Atkins diet last week, slimmers began putting bread, potatoes and pasta back on the menu.

But an investigation by Scotland on Sunday has discovered that Jebb, head of nutrition and health research at Britain’s Medical Research Council (MRC), is working on a report into obesity funded by the Flour Advisory Bureau (FAB).

The bureau is the lobbying and consumer arm of the National Association of British and Irish Millers, and this is the second report Jebb has written for it, following an earlier study into obesity in Britain published in 1999. In total, the MRC has been paid around £20,000 to produce the two reports written by Jebb. The first recommended diets "rich in complex carbohydrates and low in fat".

Although FAB paid the MRC for the obesity report, not Jebb, the link to the flour industry has led some to question the scientist’s appraisal of the slimming technique. Her new study, according to FAB, will be looking at the "health benefits associated with eating 55% of energy intake as complex carbohydrates". Jebb denies any conflict of interest.

Last night Dr John Briffa, a London-based independent expert in nutritional medicine, said: "It’s up to other people to decide whether Susan Jebb’s view stems from her links with the flour industry. But if it appears that her scientific view has been skewed by the food industry, that is of enormous concern."

Read full article here: Scotland on Sunday

The Atkins economy

Aug 14th 2003
From The Economist print edition

How to lose weight and make money with low carbohydrate diets

“OF ALL the parasites that reflect humanity, I do not know of, nor can I imagine, any more distressing than that of obesity,” wrote William Banting in what was probably the first guide to following a low-carbohydrate diet. After trying all manner of remedies, in 1862 this London undertaker was horrified that he still tipped the scales at 202 pounds (92 kg). A year later, after following his high-protein diet, he had shed 46 pounds. Today he would probably have been a devotee of the Atkins diet, which is having a huge impact not just on the slimming business—worth over $40 billion in America alone—but on the entire food industry.

Read the full article here: economist.com

Note: About Dr Susan Jebb quoted in above article

Winners and losers in the Atkins phenomenon

By Maxine Frith, Social Affairs Correspondent
02 August 2003

The soaring popularity of the Atkins Diet has seen 2 million Britons declare war on their waistlines. But it is not just flab that is feeling the pinch.

The slimming industry, food manufacturers and beer brewers are all seeing their profits slimmed down as devotees empty their fridges of any product with the cheek to carry a carbohydrate.

Full article: independent.co.uk

Is our daily bread latest victim of Atkins diet?

First it was spuds, now Brits are shunning the humble loaf as low-carb craze sweeps nation
By Jenifer Johnston

"First it was potatoes, then slimming shakes … now bread manufacturers fear they will become the next victims of the Atkins diet craze.

The Federation of Bakers has told the Sunday Herald that the diet, which works on a low- carbohydrate, high-protein formula to promote weight loss, is already affecting sales of bread in the UK. Bread is banned from the earlier stages of the Atkins regime."

Full article: Sunday Herald

In sickness and in health: Atkins at large

Dr James Le Fanu says eat more fat and grow thin

There is nothing equivocal, no "ifs and buts", about the scientific vindication of Dr Robert Atkins's politically incorrect "high-fat" diet, as reported in this paper last week.

For the best part of 20 years, legions of nutritionists, doctors, health educationists, food faddists and other busybodies have solemnly warned us about the wickedness of saturated fats in meats and dairy foods - how they make you fat, clog up the arteries, cause cancer and, indeed, virtually any illness known to man.

If only we were to embrace the more wholesome and ascetic virtues of a low-fat diet - piling our plates high with pasta, pulses and bread - we would be slimmer, our cholesterol levels would be lower and we would live forever.

As we now know, however, that is not how it has turned out. When the two types of diet were directly compared, those on the Atkins high-fat diet won hands down, losing twice as much weight, with lower levels of glucose and a better balance of fats in the blood. This outcome, so contrary to prevailing opinion, requires some explanation.

Full article: telegraph.co.uk

'I didn't even feel hungry'

Clinical trials published last week show that the controversial Atkins diet really can help people lose weight. That's not news to Suzanne Levy, now a size 12

26 May 2003

As moments go, it was one of the sweetest. I'm in the changing rooms, trying on a skirt. It fits - and it's a size 12. I'm blinking, squinting at the label. Is this a mistake? I've been a 14, and then a 16, for years. But there's no mistake - I look at the mirror, see my newly slim shape, and feel like weeping. I love Dr Atkins.

And it looks like it's not just me. Last week, the first clinical trials of the Atkins diet were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The diet, which involves cutting out carbohydrates such as bread, pasta and rice, but eating plenty of protein and usually forbidden fats, has sold millions of copies and is much praised by celebrities such as Renée Zellweger. It has attracted plenty of controversy, too. Yet these trials show that people lose weight faster on this diet than using other methods and that it doesn't appear to damage your health, as its critics have suggested...

Full article: independent.co.uk

Praise the Lard

Detractors are being forced to eat their scathing words after two studies last week found that the Atkins diet works - and it's good for you, report Olga Craig and Robert Matthews.

Full article: telegraph.co.uk

Atkins diet 'is beneficial and twice as effective as rivals'

The controversial Atkins diet, which severely restricts carbohydrates in favour of unlimited amounts of fat and protein, is twice as effective as conventional diets at shedding excess pounds, new research has shown.

In a six-month trial, volunteers following the regime lost twice as much weight as those on more traditional low-calorie, high-carbohydrate diets.

And despite fears that the bestselling diet could be harmful in the long term, researchers found that the diet protected against heart disease by increasing levels of "good" cholesterol.

Full article: telegraph.co.uk

A spot of bother

Acne is often blamed on chocolate, but it's carbohydrates that are the guilty ones, says Dr John Briffa

Acne is generally thought of as an adolescent affliction, although my experience suggests otherwise. In my practice, I see a regular stream of individuals who continue to suffer from 'bad skin' long after puberty. In fact, statistics show that more than one in two women and 40 per cent of men over 25 have some acne, and for a few this problem persists into middle age. Traditional nutritional advice is to avoid fatty food, especially chocolate. However, recent evidence suggests it is not fat but another commonly found ingredient in chockie bars that incites the skin to break out.

Clues to the causes of acne may be found by comparing the nutritional habits of different populations. Researchers looked at the diets and dermatological health of two indigenous populations: the Kitavan islanders from Papua New Guinea and the Aché hunter-gatherers from Paraguay. While the Kitavans subsist mainly on fruit, vegetables, fish and coconut, the Aché diet is comprised almost entirely of wild, foraged-for and locally cultivated foods. Intriguingly, the prevalence of acne in both these groups eating essentially natural foods was found to be nil. This is in stark contrast to the high rates of acne seen in industrialised nations.

Full article: The Observer

Fat makes comeback after 3 lean decades

"For years in the test kitchens of Cooking Light magazine, virtually every recipe started with low-fat cooking spray. If a little more fat was needed, readers were advised to use margarine.

But no more. The nation's largest-circulation food and fitness magazine still preaches the value of lower fat cooking, but now recipes call for healthy amounts of canola oil, olive oil and -- egads -- even butter.

"We now know the kind of fat is more important than the quantity," said food editor Jill Melton. "We have loosened, and so have our readers."

All over the country, and especially in the food-sophisticated Bay Area, fat, in all its glorious, slick incarnations, is coming back. After three lean decades, chefs, home cooks and even the nutritionists who persuaded us to board the low-fat bus in the first place are rejecting the notion that fat is what makes us fat.

"We're beginning a new kind of balance," said Clark Wolf, a food and restaurant consultant in San Francisco and New York who works with New York University's Department of Nutrition and Food Studies. "In the '80s, we really had food phobias. People were afraid of cheese and butter and eggs."

Full article: sfgate.com

Hepatic de novo lipogenesis in normoinsulinemic and hyperinsulinemic subjects consuming high-fat, low-carbohydrate and low-fat, high-carbohydrate isoenergetic diets

"Compared with baseline, consumption of the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet did not affect triacylglycerol concentrations. However, after the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, triacylglycerols increased significantly and DNL was 5–6-fold higher than in normoinsulinemic subjects consuming a high-fat diet. The increase in triacylglycerol after the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet was correlated with fractional DNL (P < 0.01), indicating that subjects with high DNL had the greatest increase in triacylglycerols.

Conclusions: These results support the concept that both hyperinsulinemia and a low-fat diet increase DNL, and that DNL contributes to hypertriglyceridemia."

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 77, No. 1, 43-50, January 2003

Full article: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

May be possible to stay slim and eat what you want

"The researchers, headed by C. Ronald Kahn at the Joslin Diabetes Center, reported on their experiments with mice that have been genetically altered to have no insulin receptor in fat. These so-called FIRKO mice were able to eat all they wanted and remain lean. In fact, even when they were stimulated to overeat, they failed to gain any extra weight. What's even more important is that these mice live longer than brother/sister controls that ate the same amount of food but did not have this genetic knockout."

Full article: Harvard Gazette

Sorting Out an Eating Plan in a Nation Filled With Dietary Confusion

A couple months ago, I met Dr. Robert Atkins in a green room for "New York Close-Up," the talk show on NY1. Dr. Atkins and I both had new books to talk about. His will sell a million copies. Mine won't. Dr. Atkins looked fit and lean, if a little worn from a busy interview schedule. I was a little worn too, but not so fit and lean. "So how's your cholesterol?" I wanted to ask him, but didn't, because he probably knew what his was and I didn't know my own. He also had a plan for losing weight, and I didn't. Like many Americans when it comes to thinking about health, I have lived, until recently, not in passive denial but in active avoidance.

Meeting Dr. Atkins, who died last month after slipping on an icy sidewalk, was like meeting the conundrum of the American diet in the flesh. Americans are overweight in record numbers, by record amounts, and at improbably young ages as well. Obesity is no longer a personal problem in this country; it's an epidemiological problem. We are maladapted, in an evolutionary sense, to the most abundant foods around us. We live in a wilderness of dangerous fats and highly refined carbohydrates, suitable perhaps for some other kind of creature but not for us. And what makes that wilderness of foods all the more dangerous is the feeling that somehow we're entitled to eat them. They're convenient, cheap and brightly packaged, symbols of the American way of life. We give ourselves permission to eat them. We feel we deserve to eat them. It was a hard day, after all.

Full article: New York Times [registration required]

Dieters track early triumphs as pounds, inches melt away

Increments can be impressive. Especially when your clothes are sliding down your thighs.

"I'm taking my first pair of pants to have altered," said Vanessa Brooks of Norcross. "They're too big in the waist."

Brooks and fellow Norcross resident Frank Turpin are in the initial stages of major weight loss goals. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is tracking their progress for the next year, recording their highs and lows and the process they endure as they work to burn off excess inches.

Brooks has lost 10 pounds in a month, a total of 17 since she set her mind and body toward building a healthier physique. She maxed out at 277 pounds and the scale read 270 a month ago. Her current weight: 260. Her pants size has shrunk from a 28 to a 22.

Full article: ajc.com

Applauding Atkins

By Joel Beck
Friday, April 25, 2003

Swampscott diet guru Barry Sears remembers his late friend and colleague

When Dr. Barry Sears had dinner with Dr. Robert Atkins in Boston last October, Sears had no idea it would be the last time he would see his longtime colleague. Nonetheless, Sears now finds himself paying his final respects to the man whom he debated many times on the topic of health and nutrition.

Sears, a Swampscott resident and creator of the Zone Diet, was as stunned as many people throughout the country when he learned that Atkins, the man behind the famed Atkins Diet, died last week. On Tuesday, April 8, Atkins was walking from his home to his office when he fell and hit his head, suffering severe head trauma. He died just nine days later.

"It just demonstrates how temporal life really is," says Sears in recalling the untimely death of his friend and colleague, who was 72 years old. Atkins' latest book, "Atkins for Life," was released in January and became the number one New York Times bestseller within days.

Also, Atkins was named one of People magazine's 25 Most Intriguing People at the end of the 20th century and was one of Time magazine's "People Who Mattered" at the end of last year.

Atkins was a cardiologist whose diet theory revolved around controlled carbohydrate intake, a method which challenged conventional medical and nutritional science.

Sears says even thought he didn't always see eye to eye with Atkins, the two always had a mutual respect. In the end, he says, their ideas on nutrition really weren't all that different.

"He had a very passionate belief in trying to improve people's health through diets," says Sears. "We both had a common vision that the obesity epidemic in our country was caused by over-consumption of carbohydrates. We just had different approaches on how to reduce that over-consumption."

Sears says he will remember most how Atkins never backed down on his theories, which were often ridiculed and condemned by people in the medical profession. By sticking to his guns, Sears believes Atkins ultimately paved the way for others to come forward with their own theories on nutrition.

"Most impressive to me is that he stood by his convictions through 30 years of continuing controversy," says Sears. "A lesser man may have said, 'I don't need this.' He had his very passionate beliefs and he stood by them. I think that's a very important lesson for all of us regardless of what we do. If you feel passionate about something, you should basically defend it to the end.

"I really think the world really lost a pioneer who questioned conventional wisdom," he adds. "I know personally, I'll miss him to a great extent."

Source: townonline.com

Incredible shrinking journalist

Don Braid
For The Calgary Herald

Friday, April 18, 2003

Because of Dr. Robert C. Atkins, the diet revolutionary who died Thursday after a fall, there's a lot less of me than there used to be.

To be precise, 35 pounds less. I owe my radical shrinkage to Atkins, and will be forever grateful to this remarkable man who had the courage to stand up to North America's medical establishment for more than 30 years.

He was called a charlatan, a quack and even a criminal. But Atkins has proved to be mostly right about food and diet, while his accusers were mostly wrong.

Full article: canada.com

Diet guru who grew fat on the proceeds of the carbohydrate revolution

William Leith
Saturday April 19, 2003
The Guardian

Robert Atkins, who has died aged 72 after sustaining head injuries in a fall outside his New York clinic, was arguably the most influential diet guru in the world. He sold more than 10m copies of his book Dr Atkins' New Diet Revolution, which might have been read by as many as 30m people. In the last decade, he was cited as one of the 10 most influential people in the world.

Just over a year ago, Atkins suffered a heart attack, but, as he pointed out, this was caused by an infection and had nothing to do with the Atkins diet, which he had followed for 39 years.

Full article: The Guardian

Robert C. Atkins, M.D., Dies at 72

NEW YORK, NY—April 17, 2003—Dr. Robert C. Atkins, one of the pioneers of complementary medicine in the United States and one of the most famous, successful and enduring nutrition experts of the last 40 years, died on April 17, 2003 in New York City at the age of 72. Dr. Atkins was the founder of The Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine and Atkins Nutritionals, Inc. He also authored more than a dozen health and nutrition books, including Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, one of the 50 best-selling books of all time, and Atkins for Life. Released earlier this year, Atkins for Life quickly joined Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution on The New York Times bestseller list. The cause of death was related to head trauma from an accident that occurred while Dr. Atkins was on his way to work.

The serious snowstorm that hit New York City the day before the incident, along with unseasonably cold temperatures, left streets and sidewalks slippery. As was his daily habit, Dr. Atkins walked from his home to his office, a distance of about one mile. At approximately 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday, April 8, 2003, he fell and hit his head, suffering severe head trauma. Keith Berkowitz, M.D., a colleague at The Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine, was arriving at work at the same time, and was able to rush Dr. Atkins to the hospital within minutes. The doctors at the hospital emergency room determined that Dr. Atkins had suffered a subdural hematoma and that surgery was required to remove the blood clot from his brain. He survived for several days but eventually succumbed to complications.

Full article: atkinscenter.com

Arguing over Atkins

Traditional diet and exercise or the no-carb system? Doctors and dieters debate

By BARBARA KORNBLUH
Special to The Daily Journal
Atkins dieters don't have it easy.

They can't pig out on bread, pastas, rice and most fruit.
They're forced to improvise (read: take the hot dog out, and throw away the bun) when they get hungry on the road.
And then there are all the questions from friends and family: Isn't that unhealthy? Don't you miss eating bread and fruits? Aren't you worried the diet will raise your cholesterol?
But not all medical professionals sniff at the famous dietary plan created decades ago by Dr. Robert Atkins.

Local Atkins dieters have a friend in Dr. Charles Mintz, a Millville physician. In spite of his small frame, he has been on the diet for years.
"The Atkins diet is really a way of life for me and my family," said Mintz, 64. "I was reluctant to try it, but have been on it for the past 25 years."

Full Article: thedailyjournal.com

Atkins diet has a point, despite scientific backlash

Calories vs. carbs

The battle heated up last week when the Journal of the American Medical Association weighed in, concluding there's nothing special about the low-carbohydrate diet promoted by best-selling diet guru Robert Atkins.

Dr. Atkins has long claimed that severely restricting carbohydrates results in metabolic changes that help dieters lose weight faster than a traditional low-calorie diet. The Jama authors, however, reviewed nearly 40 years of medical studies and concluded the low-carb diet is simply another way to cut high-calorie foods.

But the calorie-vs.-carb debate may be missing a crucial point. While the science shows all calories are created equal, it's increasingly clear that all carbohydrates are not. Not only are many high-carb foods very fattening, but certain types of carbs also can make it tougher to stick to a diet.

Full article: sfgate.com

Update on Dr. Robert C. Atkins' Condition

Dr. Robert C. Atkins Remains Hospitalized After Accident

New York, NY, April 14, 2003—Family and friends continue their vigil at the bedside of Dr. Robert C. Atkins. As of today, Dr. Atkins remains in a coma and on life support. Although his physicians continue to report that Dr. Atkins’ chances of a meaningful recovery are slim, the family continues to hope for a miracle and every measure possible is being considered to save his life. “I want to thank the thousands of people who have sent emails, cards, flowers and have called saying that they are praying for my husband, “ says Veronica Atkins. “It makes me proud that my husband has touched so many lives and having this reaffirmed at this time is very much helping me through this terrible ordeal. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

As many of you already know, early Tuesday morning April 8th, on his daily walk to work, Dr. Atkins fell on the sidewalk outside his office and suffered injuries to his head. The dramatic snowstorm that hit New York City the day before along with the unusually cold temperatures left streets and sidewalks slippery. Dr. Keith Berkowitz, his colleague at The Atkins Center, was arriving at work at the same time and was able to rush Dr. Atkins to Cornell University Medical Center. Dr. Atkins suffered severe head trauma and required surgery.

Source: atkinscenter.com

Diet Doctor Atkins in Coma in Hospital

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Diet doctor Robert Atkins remained in a coma and on life support almost a week after slipping on an icy sidewalk in New York and hitting his head, his spokesman said on Monday.

Atkins, 72, promoter of a popular but controversial high-protein, low carbohydrate diet, was taken to the hospital last Tuesday morning after falling near the Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine in Manhattan.

Spokesman Richard Rothstein said Atkins was "in a coma and on life support" at the Weill Cornell Medical Center. Atkins underwent surgery after his fall on the sidewalk, which was still icy after an unusual spring snowstorm that hit the New York region last Monday.

Full article: Yahoo! News

Trial of a Very Low Carbohydrate Diet

A Randomized Trial Comparing a Very Low Carbohydrate Diet and a Calorie-Restricted Low Fat Diet on Body Weight and Cardiovascular Risk Factors in Healthy Women

BONNIE J. BREHM, RANDY J. SEELEY, STEPHEN R. DANIELS, AND DAVID A. D’ALESSIO
University of Cincinnati and Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221

Untested alternative weight loss diets, such as very low carbohydrate diets, have unsubstantiated efficacy and the potential to adversely affect cardiovascular risk factors. Therefore, we designed a randomized, controlled trial to determine the effects of a very low carbohydrate diet on body composition and cardiovascular risk factors. Subjects were randomized to 6 months of either an ad libitum very low carbohydrate diet or a calorie-restricted diet with 30% of the calories as fat.
Anthropometric and metabolic measures were assessed at baseline, 3 months, and 6 months. Fifty-three healthy, obese female volunteers (mean body mass index, 33.6 +/- 0.3 kg/m2) were randomized; 42 (79%) completed the trial. Women on both diets reduced calorie consumption by comparable amounts at 3 and 6 months. The very low carbohydrate diet group lost more weight (8.5 +/- 1.0 vs. 3.9 +/- 1.0 kg; P < 0.001) and more body fat (4.8+/-0.67 vs. 2.0+/-0.75 kg; P<0.01) than the low fat diet group. Mean levels of blood pressure, lipids, fasting glucose, and insulin were within normal ranges in both groups at baseline. Although all of these parameters improved over the course of the study, there were no differences observed between the two diet groups at 3 or 6 months. Beta-Hydroxybutyrate increased significantly in the very low carbohydrate group at 3 months (P = 0.001). Based on these data, a very low carbohydrate diet is more effective than a low fat diet for short-term weight loss and, over 6 months, is not associated with deleterious effects on important cardiovascular risk factors in healthy women. (J Clin Endocrinol Metab 88: 1617–1623, 2003)

Full text article: endo-society.org [PDF File]

A human time bomb

By Jerome Burne
A 35-40in waist means greater risk of diabetes and stroke

ANTONY WORRALL THOMPSON, the celebrity chef, has been worrying about his waist. It is a bit more than 40in (101cm), which means that he is at risk of a newly identified disorder that is causing concern among health experts. The condition already affects 25-30 per cent of the population and, if left untreated, can lead to diabetes, heart disease and stroke. It has also been linked with poor memory and a shrunken hippocampus — the area of the brain involved in memory formation.
Worrall Thompson is the face of a new campaign to “measure your mate”, which aims to raise awareness about the condition, known as insulin resistance syndrome (IRS). If your mate — or any male who lets you wrap a tape measure around them — measures more than 40in, they are at risk of IRS. The red-light figure for women is 35in.

IRS, which is also known as metabolic syndrome, glucose intolerance and Syndrome X, has been dubbed a “medical time bomb” because it could lead to an explosion of disease in years to come. And not only among those facing midlife spread. Derriford Hospital in Plymouth last month reported that 30 per cent of 300 children between the ages of 5 and 16 were showing signs of it. Diabetes now affects about 4 per cent of the population.

The key to all this is the way that your body handles glucose. Until recently this was considered a specialised medical problem reserved for diabetics. But this comforting division is an illusion; our sedentary lifestyle, coupled with a taste for sugar and refined carbohydrates, is playing havoc with the subtle balance between glucose and insulin in our bloodstreams.

Refined carbohydrates are dangerous in the long term because they are too easily digested. The body turns all carbohydrates into glucose, which is then released into the blood. But while wholefoods, such as pulses, fruit and most vegetables, are broken down over several hours, providing a steady trickle of glucose, a sugar-laden fizzy drink, for instance, produces a glucose spike — a sudden rise, followed by an equally dramatic fall. An occasional sugar spike is no big deal; but day after day, over many years, it can be deadly. As glucose levels rise, your body releases insulin to mop it up. After years of glucose peaks, the extra amounts of insulin have a diminishing effect. IRS then develops — a pre-diabetic state with high levels of both insulin and glucose circulating in your blood. The result, among other things, is that hard-to-shift spare tyre around the middle and damage to blood vessels and the heart.

In America the syndrome has been recognised as a medical condition, officially defined as having three or more of five conditions: abdominal obesity, high triglycerides (damaging fats) in the bloodstream, low levels of the good LDL cholesterol, high blood pressure and high glucose.

In sufferers, this can translate to feeling sluggish most of the time, nervousness, being in a low mood for no good reason, strong cravings for white bread and pastries, bingeing on chocolates or sweet snacks more than three times a week, using caffeinated drinks to stay alert and exercising fewer than three times a week.

We, too, need to recognise the condition, says Giancarlo Viberti, professor of diabetes and metabolic medicine at Guy’s Hospital. “At the moment someone who shows up in a doctor’s surgery with those symptoms probably would not be spotted as being at risk of heart disease and diabetes. By the time they are diagnosed as diabetic, 50 per cent of sufferers already have signs of damaged blood vessels.”

So what can be done? Experts such as Viberti agree that the best course of action is dieting to lose weight and taking 30 minutes of daily exercise, such as a brisk walk. But because diets are notoriously hard to stick to, the medical profession also favours a pharmaceutical approach, with weight-loss drugs such as Xenical (which prevents fats from being absorbed from your gut), and “early and intensive intervention with a combination of drugs” for diabetes. This means drugs to reduce insulin production (metformin), plus ones to increase insulin sensitivity (glitazones). Reducing hypertension with beta blockers is not advised since they make insulin resistance worse.

It is not an approach that finds favour with Sandra Lees, a former IRS suffer who “cured” herself with a change of diet and supplements. She has now become an energetic campaigner for the nutritional approach, working with Dr Ann de Wees Allen, the chief of biomedical research at the Glycemic Research Institute in Washington. “Just cutting calories or going on a low-fat diet is unlikely to do any good,” Lees says. “Most low-fat products are loaded with sugar, for a start.”

Instead Lees stuck to a low-glycaemic diet, ie, one made up of foods that don’t raise blood sugar levels. Broadly, that means going for foods such as sausages, beans, porridge and wholegrain pasta, and avoiding the likes of bagels, cornflakes, bananas and beetroot. One of the UK’s supermarkets already has a range of low-glycaemic foods in the pipeline.

This approach also involves the use of various supplements. High glucose and insulin levels, for instance, increase the amount of damaging free radicals in the bloodstream, which means that your body needs more antioxidants, such as vitamins C and E. Another antioxidant, alpha lipoic acid, has been found to lower glucose levels, while magnesium improves the way that the body handles excess glucose.

Such an approach is controversial and doesn’t have the backing of large-scale studies; but evidence for a nutritional approach to what is, after all, a nutritional problem, is coming in. A study published earlier this year in The Journal of Nutrition reported that adding an essential fatty acid called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) to the diet of diabetics lowered their blood sugar levels by five time more than a placebo. Those on CLA also lost weight.

Source: Times Online

Report on Energy Bar Study Erred in Grouping Results

A recent report on research from Ohio State University on the effect on insulin and glucose levels produced by eating energy bars erroneously generalized the findings to all bars in the study when in fact, one bar -- the Atkins Advantage Bar -- showed minimal impact on blood sugar.

The study confirmed that Atkins Advantage Bars produced a significant reduction (71 percent) in plasma glucose levels compared to white bread with similar calorie levels (which served as a control for the study), and a reduction of 26 percent in serum insulin compared with controls. This study demonstrated that substitution of other macronutrients for carbohydrates is effective for reducing post prandial glycemia.

When the study evaluated other moderate and high carbohydrate bars, the insulin response was actually elevated compared with the white bread control. This was not the case with the Atkins Bar. The three bars in the study produced very different results.

The results of the study showed that the Atkins Advantage Bar significantly reduced both blood glucose levels and serum insulin compared to the control and the other bars. The original report of this research inaccurately characterized all bars in the study as a group.

Source: The Ohio State University Division of Medical Dietetics

Dr. Robert C. Atkins In Very Critical Condition After Accident

New York, NY, April 11, 2003—

As of today, we are saddened to report that Dr. Robert C. Atkins remains gravely ill. He is in a coma and on life support. His physician reports that Dr. Atkins' chances of a meaningful recovery are slim. Nonetheless, we are hoping for a miracle and every measure possible is being considered to save his life.

As many of you already know, early Tuesday morning April 8th, on his daily walk to work, Dr. Atkins fell on the sidewalk outside his office and suffered injuries to his head. The dramatic snowstorm that hit New York City the day before along with the unusually cold temperatures left streets and sidewalks slippery. Dr. Keith Berkowitz, his colleague at The Atkins Center, was arriving at work at the same time and was able to rush Dr. Atkins to Cornell University Medical Center. Dr. Atkins suffered severe head trauma and required surgery.

Source: Atkinscenter.com

Diet Promoter Robert Atkins Hospitalized

Wednesday April 9, 2003 9:50 PM

NEW YORK (AP) - Low-carbohydrate diet promoter Dr. Robert Atkins was
hospitalized Wednesday with severe head injuries after falling on an icy sidewalk, his spokesman said.
Atkins, 72, slipped and fell during Tuesday's snowstorm outside the Atkins
Center for Complementary Medicine, spokesman Richard Rothstein said. ``He was negotiating the snow and ice and failed in that negotiation,'' Rothstein said.
A colleague rushed Atkins to New York Weill Cornell Medical Center, where he
underwent surgery for severe head trauma, Rothstein said.
The extent of Atkins' impairment was unknown, he said.
``He's in recovery now, and the doctors are telling us that it will be a day or two days or three days before we have the answers to these questions,'' Rothstein said.
Atkins is the author of the best-selling ``Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution.''

Source: The Guardian

Dr. Atkins to Receive Journal of Women's Health Criterion Award

Event Type: Awards Ceremony

Location: 11th Annual Congress on Women's Health

Date: Monday, June 2, 2003
Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM EST

Featuring: Robert C. Atkins, M.D.

Description:

Dr. Atkins will receive the Journal of Women's Health Criterion Award at the 11th Annual Congress on Women's Health on Monday, June 2. The conference will take place from Saturday, May 31, to Tuesday, June 3, at the Hilton Head Marriott Beach & Golf Resort in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

This annual award from the Journal of Women's Health is given to an individual who has influenced women's health in an extraordinary way. Past award winners have ranged from Bernadine Healey, the first woman to head up the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a pioneer in the women's health movement, to Jane Fonda, who is a women's health activist and benefactor.

Dr. Atkins has been chosen to receive this award to honor his important and longstanding contribution to understanding the role of carbohydrates and their adverse effect of their over consumption on obesity, diabetes, cholesterol and heart disease; for his perseverance and determination to stay the course in the face of resistance and doubt from the medical and scientific community; and for his commitment to fight the growing and deleterious effects of the obesity epidemic.

Source: Atkinscenter

BBC Diet Trials Results

Official site: BBC Diet Trials Results

Quote Barry Groves, PhD - Second Opinions:

+

These snippets from Low-Carb in the UK with permission from the author Barry Groves, PhD, Author of "Eat Fat, Get Thin!" and Second Opinions.

Dining well on Atkins

Chefs: Diet means tossing out carbs, but not seasoning

By Barbara Yost, Gannett News Service

You've tried the cabbage-soup diet, Jenny Craig and Jared's Subway diet. You paid good money to go to a spa where dinner was a leaf of watercress and one crouton served by waiters who looked like Huns raised on bratwurst and beer.

And still the love handles persist.

So now you're on the Atkins diet, which, according to recent accounts, appears to be an effective weight-loss program. Half a dozen recent studies have found that people following the low-carbohydrate, high-protein plan lost weight without risking heart problems.

The diet allows liberal servings of protein and some vegetables. Fruits can be introduced later.

No-nos include "whites": white bread, white rice, white pasta and refined sugar. Once you've reached your weight goal, you can add whole grains and brown rice. But kiss the Oreos and Cheetos good-bye forever.

Still, Stephanie Grozdea, food editor of Atkins Nutritionals, insists that the diet is "very, very livable."

"People are under the misconception that Atkins is meat, bacon and cheeseburgers without the bun. It's much more than that. It teaches you to eat better and have more energy."

Full article: cityguide.jconline.com

Low Carbohydrate diets - BBC Health

Q: Low carbohydrate diets
There are lots of celebrities at the moment singing the praises of a diet which has a lot of protein and very little carbohydrate as a great way to lose weight. Do these really work and how can I find out more?
Maureen

Dr Trisha Macnair responds

Most doctors, every now and then, go through a complete change of opinion on some particular condition or treatment. In fact many medical journals, such as the British Medical Journal, carry regular columns called something like 'The day a patient changed my practice', in the hope of shaking up entrenched views and inspiring other doctors to look at things afresh.

And this is what has happened to me with low carbohydrate diets, such as the Atkins diet. A couple of years ago I answered Maureen's question with fairly standard reservations about the claims being made for high protein, low carbohydrate diets. The main focus of these diets is to reduce carbohydrate intake as low as possible - fat and protein can be freely eaten, which may mean that fat and protein intake is high (but not necessarily if you don't eat too much of them). The whole approach of the diet goes completely against much current thinking about the importance of carbohydrate as a staple of healthy eating, and the possible risks of too much fat. At that time there was little scientific evidence to show if or how low carb diets might work, and there were (and still are) some reasonable questions to be asked about safety - could they be harmful? But now, with research starting to back them, and the personal experience of trying this sort of diet, I am convinced that with a couple of adaptations they really can be an effective way to lose weight.

Full article: BBC Health

Insulin Response to some energy bars is out of balance

"Compared to white bread, eating the low-carbohydrate bar lowered insulin by about a quarter. Insulin levels rose by more than a third after participants ate the moderate-carbohydrate energy bar, and increased nearly three-quarters after eating the high-carbohydrate energy bar. Eating chicken caused the lowest insulin response – resulting insulin levels were more than three-quarters lower than those caused by white bread."

Full article: Ohio State University

So unfair men are best at losing weight

By Elizabeth Day
(Filed: 23/03/2003)

The largest comparative dieting study ever conducted has found that men are far better at losing weight than women.

The six-month study, conducted by Surrey University, monitored 300 volunteers who were attempting to slim using the nation's four most popular diets.

At the end of the trial 13 out of the top 20 dieters were male, even though men made up only 30 per cent of the participants.

On average, men on the trial lost twice as much weight as women, even though all the dieters were randomly allocated one of four different eating programmes - Weight Watchers, Slim Fast, Rosemary Conley or Dr Atkins.

Full article: Daily Telegraph

Researchers Address Urgent Need for Long-Term Data

Researchers Address Urgent Need for Long-Term Data On Nutritional Impact and Habits of Controlled Carbohydrate Lifestyles

Thursday March 20, 10:44 am ET

NEW YORK, March 20 /PRNewswire/ -- The first scientific tracking system designed to provide researchers with accurate data on controlled carbohydrate eating habits is now up and running on the Internet. The purpose of CCARBS (The Controlled Carbohydrate Assessment Registry Bank Study), is to investigate long-term weight variations, eating patterns and lifestyles of Americans who follow a controlled carbohydrate nutritional approach. This will be the first time that any medical facility has undertaken this task, applying rigorous scientific and objective methods rather than just collecting anecdotal and random information.

CCARBS will address many of the ongoing and long-term questions posed by the growing role of controlled carbohydrate weight-loss diets in obesity and obesity-related disease management. The study will also function as a unique source of ongoing data for qualified investigators and journalists seeking to answer specific hypotheses and questions. CCARBS is the first database to provide an accurate assessment of the controlled carbohydrate lifestyle population in the United States.

The research is being independently conducted at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and has been made possible though an unrestricted grant from The Dr. Robert C. Atkins Foundation.

"While controlled carbohydrate weight-loss diets (containing no more than 25 percent of energy as carbohydrates) have been popular with the general public for more than 30 years," explains Principal Investigator, Dr. CJ Segal-Isaacson, "little is known about the characteristics of people who use controlled carbohydrate diets to regulate their weight or their level of long-term success with weight maintenance.

"The purpose of CCARBS is to establish an Internet-based epidemiological cohort of dieters who are using or have used controlled carbohydrate diets. With the data we collect we plan to identify key lifestyle patterns associated with using controlled carbohydrate diets and predictors of success with using them. We will also be looking at the effect of controlled carbohydrate diets on cholesterol levels and other blood lipids in a subset of CCARBS participants and compare them to age and gender-matched people who use low-fat diets for weight control."

The eligibility criteria for becoming a participant in the CCARB study is:

1. To have been on a controlled carbohydrate diet for at least two months
within the past two years
2. To be 18 years or older
3. To be willing to answer questionnaires online for three years (at
baseline, three months and then annually for three years)

Controlled carbohydrate followers who are interested in participating in the study can simply log on to the CCARB Study website at , register, take the initial screening questionnaire and then follow instructions for participation.

Once accepted in the registry, CCARBS participants will receive, in addition to the satisfaction of contributing significantly to scientific knowledge about controlled carbohydrate diets, the following free services:

* Dietary analysis each time they complete questionnaires
* Access to a nutritionist to ask questions online
* Monthly newsletters on controlled carbohydrate topics and other health-related topics
* Controlled carbohydrate recipes

Dr. CJ Segal-Isaacson, assistant clinical professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has been a nutritionist in the field of weight control and eating disorders for more than two decades. Seeing the need for alternative weight control approaches, she began conducting research on controlled carbohydrate dieters three years ago. Over 6,000 people who had used controlled carbohydrate diets participated in her Low Carbohydrate Weight Loss Diet Study, the pilot study for CCARBS. The results of this study were presented at the most recent American Dietetic Association conference in October 2002.

Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, established in 1955, is one of the nation's leading centers for medical research and education. It is consistently among the national leaders in terms of peer-reviewed research support; in fiscal 2001, Einstein received more than $120 million in research grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Particular areas of research strength for which Einstein is widely renowned include: Alzheimer's disease, neuroscience, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, liver diseases, immunology and molecular genetics.

Source: Atkins Health and Medical Information Services

Source: Yahoo! Financial News

Beef vs. Bagels: U.S. Food Firms Take on Dr. Atkins

Tue March 18, 2003 08:47 AM ET
By Carey Gillam

OVERLAND PARK, Kansas (Reuters) - It has been months since Tina Moore last bit into a bagel or a slice of toast.

"Protein is good. Carbs are bad," says 41-year-old Moore, who altered her diet five years ago in a bid to lose weight.

Moore, the owner of a hair salon, is one of an estimated 15 million-plus Americans seen as devoted followers of dieting guru Dr. Robert Atkins, who recommends eating a diet high in protein for those who want to lose weight and keep it off.

"Carbs and sugar...they give you a quick high, then you get really low. You get tired and hungry," said Moore, who sees herself as a reformed "carbohydrate addict."

The hamburger patty is good, the hamburger bun bad, according to the teachings of Atkins, who has turned his philosophies into a dieting revolution, starting with his first book, "Dr Atkins Diet Revolution," in 1972.

Atkins' books -- his latest, "Atkins for Life," was published this year -- routinely top best-seller lists. Atkins companies have racked up millions of dollars in sales of specialty low-carb food products and carb-counting scales.

But the popularity of Atkins's eating advice, now appealing to another generation, is fraying the nerves of some food companies who rely on the consumer appetite for carbohydrate-laden foods such as pastas and pizzas, cakes, cookies and cereals, to add heft to their own bottom lines.

They claim Atkins is falsely disparaging food groups that serve as a foundation for American eating. And that by teaching people to limit severely the use of flour-based products, Atkins is eating into sales of some bread and cereal products in the United States.

"Our industry has to do something, and soon. It is starting to become a mainstream belief that carbohydrates are bad," said Judi Adams, director of the Wheat Foods Council, a consortium of industry players.

Full article: Reuters

Thin Memories - Dr. Atkins

Author of controversial diet has Dayton roots, but his heart's in NYC

By D.L. Stewart
e-mail address: DL_Stewart~coxohio.com
Dayton Daily News

For five cents, readers of the Dayton Herald on April 8, 1947, got an eyeful of good news about the Dayton school system. In the annual statewide general scholarship test for high school seniors, Dayton schools “took the lion’s share of top winnings.”

More than 8,500 seniors from 1,300 Ohio high schools took the test, the lead story on the front page reported, and Wilbur Wright, Fairmont and Oakwood all finished in the top 25. But it was the Fairview Bulldogs who led the way; five of the school’s seniors were among the top 25 boys in the state.

Among them was Robert C. Atkins, of 1929 Elsmere Ave., who finished second in the state.

“He plans to study medicine at Ohio State University,” noted the story, which was accompanied by a photo of the slender 16-year-old senior wearing a sport coat and, inexplicably, holding a basketball.

Nearly 56 years later, Atkins still remembers his score: 269 points out of a possible 300. But he isn’t quite sure about the basketball.

“I guess it’s because basketball was my favorite sport,” he muses. “But I was too small to play it. I had skipped a grade, so I was a year and a half younger than everyone else. And, when I graduated, I only weighed 135 pounds.”

Atkins never went to Ohio State, opting, instead, for the University of Michigan. And he never played basketball. But weight has remained an important issue for the man who created The Atkins Diet.

To his disciples, Dr. Robert Atkins is the flavor savior who put meat and cheese back on their plates. To much of the medical establishment, he is a health-harming heretic who is clogging the arteries of America with animal fat. The argument has raged around the kid with the basketball in his hands for more than 30 years.

A biographer would say Atkins got his start in Columbus, which is where he was born. Most of his life, though, has been spent in New York City and he refers to himself as a New Yorker.

“The first time I came to New York I realized I didn’t like small towns as much as I like gigantic towns,” he says during a recent phone interview that followed his cheese omelette breakfast. His office is in midtown Manhattan, where he is “busier than I’ve ever been.” He lives on the 20th floor of a building overlooking the East River with his octo-lingual, Russian-born wife Veronica, whom he married when he was 57.

But Atkins is, undeniably, a product of the Dayton school system.

He was in seventh grade when his family moved to Dayton, where his mother settled in as a housewife, and his father “owned a few little restaurants and places where people could stay overnight.”

‘Partial to Dayton’
“I’m partial to Dayton, because I was more mature when I lived there than when I lived in Columbus,” he notes. “Most of what I learned before college I learned in Dayton.”

Whatever he may have learned here, his recollections of the small town in which he spent the majority of his teenagehood seem more perfunctory than warm. He is no Roger Clemens, the major league baseball star who sniped that the best thing about Dayton was seeing it in the rearview mirror.

But the memories Atkins cites evoke little enthusiasm. He recalls no favorite restaurants or stores, no best buddies or unrequited loves, no malt shoppes where the gang hung out after school. He doesn’t mention the name of his junior high or the names of any teachers.

After 56 years, the memory gaps certainly can be understood. Or, if he remembers these things, it could be that he chooses not to mention them. Perhaps the closest he comes to a memory that is up close and personal is an observation about his classmates that “they only really enjoyed people who were athletes rather than brains.”

“I guess I remember Fairview High School,” he concedes when pressed. “It’s still my best memory. In those days there’s no question that the people in my high school were extremely bright. And I remember during the war I had a job selling shoes in a shoe store on the weekends. I was 14 years old and here I was selling shoes to grown-ups.”

He remembers, too, appearing on a local (WHIO) radio show with some of the other kids from school when he was 16 and had thoughts of becoming a comedian.

Those thoughts lingered until after he graduated from Michigan and spent a summer as a waiter and entertainer at hotels in the Adirondacks. But then he headed off to Cornell University Medical School, and comedy gave way to cardiology, with a residency at St. Luke's Hospital in New York, a suite of offices on Park Avenue and occasional mentions in his hometown newspapers. In 1962 he earned a small headline in the Dayton Journal Herald for assisting in a transatlantic electrocardiogram for actor Edward G. Robinson.

Gains 90 pounds
As Atkins’ practice grew, so did he, until the 135-pound high school graduate eventually weighed 225. He tried traditional low-fat diets, which left him hungrier, but no thinner.

“It’s beyond my comprehension how anyone can put up with the kind of hunger I put up with,” he said in a 1973 interview in The Journal Herald.

So he turned the food pyramid upside down, developing a diet based on a study he read in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1963.

“It said there was an alternative to a low-calorie diet, which is a low-carbohydrate diet. So I went on it about a month after it printed, and I felt so much better as a result,” recalled Atkins. “One important thing is that I needed three hours less sleep a night. I still wake up after 5 1/2 or 6 hours of sleep.” He lost 27 pounds in six weeks, he said.

But the medical world gained a debate that has lasted for more than 30 years.

Long before Taco Bell used the slogan, Atkins began urging his patients to think outside the bun. The danger wasn’t in the high-fat, double-deck, cheese-covered contents available at the fast-food places popping up on every street corner, he insisted. It was in the carbohydrate-loaded, white-flour bread that surrounded them.

‘Revolution’ begins
In 1970 his “eat all you want” advice became known as the Vogue diet when it was published in that magazine. The article generated, he says, 1 million requests for copies of the plan he had conceived. And it gave birth in 1972 to Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution, reputedly one of the top 50 best-selling books of all time.

One major boost for the book came from comedian Buddy Hackett, who drew attention to it with shtick on The Tonight Show.

“He said some funny things on the show,” Atkins relates, lapsing into a passable imitation of the pudgy comedian answering a question from Johnny Carson:

“You know how I lost this weight? Dr. Atkins used to call me every hour and say, ‘Are you eating?’ ”

The medical establishment was not amused. The American Medical Association termed his work “unscientific and potentially dangerous.”

Atkins countered that the criticism was “politically motivated” and that the AMA would change its views toward him when there were new individuals in office.

“The AMA faces its largest credibility gap in history,” he declared. “The true scientific community doesn’t believe them.”

In 1972, Atkins returned to Dayton for an appearance on the Phil Donahue Show. He took the occasion to declare that “calories are just a colossal hoax perpetrated on the victimized public,” “sugar is poison” and “low-cal diets, portion control and balanced diets are not the answer.” He also bashed Weight Watchers, the Stillman water diet and fruit.

A year later, an AMA spokesman testified before a Senate committee headed by George McGovern that the diet was “risky and very dangerous.” Atkins countered that the AMA “should be cooperating on the development of fresh approaches for combating obesity instead of quarreling over every new suggestion that departs from the traditionally standard but unsuccessful recommendations of the medical establishment.” The same year a lawsuit was filed in Cleveland demanding that the sale of the book be banned in Ohio.

Diet rivals clash
In 1981, diet plan rival Nathan Pritikin declared that Atkins’ diet could cause everything from heart problems to bad breath. Atkins’ reply was a summons connected to a $5 million libel and slander suit.

The weighty war of words eventually settled into a publicity truce. But, last year, the cease fire ended.

In April, Atkins’ critics appeared to have fresh ammunition for their artery-clogging claims when it was reported that he had suffered a heart attack at his Manhattan home during breakfast. A statement quickly appeared on his company’s Web site insisting, “This was not a heart attack but a cardiac arrest related to an infection of the heart he has been suffering from for a few years.”

Later that year Atkins fired back with an assault of his own: a Duke University diet and fitness center study by Dr. Eric Westman that seemed to endorse his diet. The mainstream press began to speculate that maybe Atkins had been right all along.

But mainstream medicine is still not about to wave a white flag. The study was publicly dissed by quotable health professionals as “such a scam” and “something that makes money for Dr. Atkins and not much more than that.”

“Hepatitis C is effective at helping people lose weight, too,” another scoffed.

Even those willing to admit that the low-fat diet might be wrong were not willing to admit that the high-fat diet is right.

“The low-fat, high-carb diet that’s been trendy for 15 years is the pendulum swinging too far in one direction,” says Dr. Stanley Rockson, chief of consultative cardiology at Stanford University. “Atkins is too far a swing in the other direction.”

Still at odds with AMA
And there is little doubt, as Atkins concedes, that any possibility of dietary peace talks in our time has been tabled by the recent publication of his latest book, Atkins for Life (St. Martin’s Press, $24.95), currently at No. 2 on the bestseller list at Books & Co. in Kettering.

“I would say we’re still not the best of friends,” he declares of his three-decade spat with the AMA. “Obviously I was overconfident about how long it would take them to change their views.”

The continuing disagreements, he says, are more than honest people with an honest difference of opinion. They are caused by “people who don’t want to admit they are wrong. It’s very hard to say ‘I know I told everybody to go on a low-fat diet, and I was wrong.’ ”

In Atkins’s eyes, there is no question who is wrong.

“After hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing to support the low-fat approach and years of information dissemination, including the Food Guide Pyramid, it is clear that low-fat programs have not proved to help most Americans enjoy an optimal weight and improved health,” he writes in the new book’s introduction.

“It really comes down to this: How would you prefer to spend the rest of your life:

A. Munching celery sticks, weighing your portions and never feeling really satisfied with your food?

B. Eating a wide variety of delicious foods in satisfying amounts — and enjoying every bite?”

Atkins clearly is not a celery stick muncher. He is 6 feet tall and lists his weight at 189 pounds, down from that high of 225. At the age of 72, he still seems to have a hearty appetite for delicious foods and a good scrap between meals. If he has trouble recalling names and places of his years in Dayton, he has no trouble at all reciting statistics that support his theories.

“There were 3,000 deaths from heart disease in 1930,” he declares. “By 1970 they went up to a million. Between 1960 and 1980 there was not a 1 percent increase in the percentage of people who had obesity. Then it doubled or tripled. The percentage of fat (consumed) dropped from 40 percent to 32 percent, but at the same time there was a 30-pound a year increase in the intake of sugar and a 64-pound increase in flour.”

All these statistics, he insists, are proof that his method is preferable to the scores of other diet plans that come and go with confusing regularity and yo-yo results. And, as he talks about metabolic pathways, the changes in the nature of carbohydrates and the evils of sugar and flour, his voice grows stronger and more impassioned. Skeptics may claim that it is all about money or ego. Atkins insists it is all about health.

“I’m trying to put an end to the epidemic proportions of obesity and diabetes,” he declares.

Although he says “quite a few” of the patients he sees in his New York office are from the Miami Valley, Atkins has no immediate plans for a house call to check up on the health of Dayton.

“It’s been a good 10 years or more since I’ve been in Dayton,” he says. “The last time I just drove around to see how much has changed. When I went there, Fairview was at the northwest end of the city and there was hardly anything beyond it.

“If I ever do come back, I would probably just look for the people I had as friends when I went to school. Hopefully, they might have a party for me.”

Or, at the very least, a steak fry.

Contact D.L. Stewart at 225-2439 or by e-mail at DL_Stewart~coxohio.com.

[From the Dayton Daily News: 02.20.2003]

Source: http://www.activedayton.com/ddn/life/daily/0220atkins.html

A low-fat diet doesn't fix bulge

The article on Caroline County's campaign promoting the ills of eating fat, particularly in milk ["What's the skinny? Caroline County works to convince residents to do dairy with less fat," Feb. 19] was both ironic and even sad in light of the Sunday article ["Atkins diet naysayers may end up eating crow," Feb. 16], which revealed that it could be excessive carbohydrates, and not fat, that present the real danger to our health.

Indeed, the low-fat-diet fad has left many people going hungry on unsustainable diets while the country gets fatter and fatter. Studies at Duke University, the American Heart Association, and others have shown that people can eat more, weigh less, have better cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and feel better on high-fat, high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets, while lowering their risk of diabetes and other diseases.

The danger of fat, and believing that fat causes you to be fat, is rapidly taking its place among the scientific facts that are stated so often that people believe them, even though the data never support them.

Unfortunately, it will be a long time before well-intentioned people who have been indoctrinated in the low-fat gospel can be turned around and even begin to believe that the experts could have been wrong, and the food pyramid was actually upside-down.

Russell Thomas

King George

Date published: 3/9/2003

Source: Freelancestar

Was Atkins Right After All?

Is it just possible that Dr. Robert C. Atkins was right? That his high-fat, low-carb plan, ridiculed for 30 years as dangerous nonsense, actually is a good, safe way to lose weight?

The dietary elite are not ready to change their collective mind, but a half-dozen or so new studies have taken an objective look at the presumed evils of Atkins, and the results have been little short of astonishing:

During a few months on the Atkins diet, people lose about twice as much as on the standard low-fat, high-carbohydrate approach recommended by most health organizations.

They do so without seeming to drive up their risk of heart disease. Rather than going kaflooey, their cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure and ominous bloodstream inflammation generally improve, perhaps even more than on the standard diet.

They appear to lose more weight even while actually consuming more calories than people on a so-called healthy diet.

All of the experiments were short and small. None by itself would make a big stir. But taken together, they undermine much of what mainstream medicine has long assumed about the Atkins diet.

"Some scientists are dismayed by the data and a little incredulous about it," says Gary Foster, who runs the weight-loss program at the University of Pennsylvania. "But the consistency of the results across studies is compelling in a way that makes us think we should investigate this further."

Until now, the opinion of the medical world on this subject has been essentially unanimous: Any diet that emphasizes meat, eggs and cheese and discourages bread, rice and fruit is nutritional folly.

The American Medical Association set that tone a year after the book, "Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution," came out in 1972. Its sarcastically worded critique dismissed the diet as "potentially dangerous." It called its scientific underpinning "naive" and "biochemically incorrect." And it scolded book publishers for promoting "bizarre concepts of nutrition and dieting."

On the Atkins diet, up to two-thirds of calories may come from fat — more than double the usual recommendation — and that violates everything medical professionals believe about healthy eating. Carbohydrates are the foundation of a good diet, most say. Eating calorie-dense fat is what makes people fat, and eating saturated fat is what kills them.

Despite this, Atkins' books have sold 15 million copies, uncounted millions have tried the diet, and practically everybody has heard of someone who dropped a ton of weight on the Atkins plan.

Finally, several research teams around the country have put Atkins to the test, driven largely by weariness at having nothing solid to tell patients and, in some cases, a desire to prove Atkins wrong. One study was even sponsored by the American Heart Association, long an Atkins skeptic.

None has been published yet, but summaries have been given at medical conferences. "They all show pretty convincingly that people will lose more weight on an Atkins diet, and their cardiovascular risk factors, if anything, get better," says Dr. Kevin O'Brien, a University of Washington cardiologist involved with one of the studies.

This is not the end of the story. The studies say nothing about how much people lose when they stay on Atkins more than a few months, whether they keep the weight off for good and whether their cholesterol rebounds when they stop losing weight.

Nevertheless, three decades of dietary gospel are in doubt, and those questioning it include some of the most prominent names in obesity research. For instance, one of the new studies was conducted by Foster with Drs. Samuel Klein and James Hill, the current and past presidents of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, the premier professional group.

"I'm part of the obesity establishment," says Foster, who has published more than 50 scientific papers on the subject. "I've spent my life researching ways to treat obesity, and 100 percent of them have been low-fat and high-carb. Now I'm beginning to think, it isn't as it has appeared."

His Atkins study was intended to "show it doesn't work," yet after three months, the overweight men and women had lost an average of 19 pounds, 10 more than people on the standard high-carb approach.

The big surprise was cholesterol. The Atkins dieters' overall profile changed for the better. Although their bad cholesterol went up seven points, their good cholesterol rose almost 12. (Changes in the high-carb dieters were less dramatic. Their bad cholesterol went down slightly while their good cholesterol remained unchanged.)

The largest difference was in triglycerides. The Atkins dieters' dropped 22 points. The low-carb dieters' didn't budge.

"It was unexpected, to put it mildly," Foster said. "It made us think maybe there is something to this."

Despite these data, the Atkins diet still gives many health professionals the willies. It encourages people to eat bacon, butter, prime rib and lots of other things loaded with saturated fat. And it lectures against such mainstay carbohydrates as grains, pasta and starchy vegetables, especially in the diet's first cold-turkey stage; plenty of other healthy things, including many low-carb green vegetables and olive oil are allowed.

"There are many principles in the Atkins diet that go against what we know," says Dr. Robert Eckel of the University of Colorado, senior author of the heart association's policy on high-protein diets. "It keeps people away from staples of the diet that we know are associated with less heart disease."

Volumes of research suggest that people have the best chance of avoiding heart disease, high blood pressure and cancer if they eat a varied diet with plenty of fruits, vegetables and grains.

"It's scary if people leave out these very important food groups and just depend on high-fat, high-protein foods," says Wahida Karmally, nutrition director at Columbia University's clinical research center.

Furthermore, people on the Atkins plan may get a quarter of their daily calories from saturated fat, more than double the heart association's recommendation. Animal experiments and studies of large groups of people long ago convinced many experts that too much saturated fat clogs the arteries and leads to heart attacks.

Mainstream scientists wave off the Atkins camp's answer to this that saturated fat is bad only if eaten with large amounts of carbohydrates. Otherwise, it's harmlessly burned off.

"When carbs are the primary fuel source, there are certain risks in excessive fat consumption," says Colette Heimowitz, the Atkins organization's research director. "But in a controlled-carb setting, when fat is the primary fuel source, the rules change. Those risk factors do not show up."

So how do the traditionalists explain the cholesterol improvement seen in the Atkins dieters? Weight loss. Slimming down reliably improves cholesterol levels, and they say its benefits probably overshadowed any damage done by all the unhealthy fat that people ate.

Why people lose more weight on the diet is also not clear, although some researchers say they buy one of Atkins' arguments: People stick with it because they are not constantly hungry. Fat and protein satisfy the appetite, the theory goes. But eating lots of carbohydrates raises insulin levels, lowers blood sugar, and eventually makes people ravenous.

But another of Atkins' ideas on the subject is far more contentious. He argues that people lose more weight on his plan even if they actually eat more calories. That's a violation of the laws of thermodynamics, skeptics say.

"A calorie is a calorie as far as weight reduction is concerned," says Dr. Michael Davidson, director of preventive cardiology at the Rush Heart Institute in Chicago.

Or is it? Some of the new studies suggest otherwise.

Dr. Stephen Sondike of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City put overweight teenagers on comparison diets for two months. The ones on Atkins lost twice as much as those on the low-fat diet. Yet they appeared to eat about 700 more calories a day than the others.

Less dramatic but still startling results came from another study at the University of Cincinnati. Women on Atkins lost twice as much while eating the same number of calories as the lowfat dieters.

"Surprised? Definitely," says Bonnie Brehm, a registered dietitian. "We really don't know what the answer is."

And the Atkins weight loss was not simply dehydration, as Atkins critics often contend, since the Cincinnati dieters also lost twice as much body fat.

But even if the diet is reasonable for a few months of slimming down, what happens when people level off during the maintenance phase of the program? Does their cholesterol soar if they eat all that fat without losing weight?

None of the research so far answers that. However, Atkins-sponsored studies by Jeff Volek, an exercise and nutrition specialist at the University of Connecticut, offers some hints.

He put fit men on an Atkins regimen for six weeks with orders not to lose weight, and nothing bad seemed to happen. Their good and bad cholesterol went up proportionately, and their triglycerides fell. "I'd like to see more data," Volek said, "but ours provides evidence it doesn't have a negative effect on your heart."

But for now, even many of the researchers who did these studies are reluctant to recommend the Atkins diet. They know too little about its long-term effects. A large new study just under way could settle these doubts.

This federally sponsored project will randomly put 360 overweight men and women on the Atkins plan or the U.S. Department of Agriculture's standard high-carb, low-fat diet, then watch them in painstaking detail for at least two years.

The study will try to answer three questions about Atkins, says Hill, who directs the University of Colorado's Center for Human Nutrition. "Does it produce weight loss? Is it a safe weight loss? And is it any better in the long run than anything else that has come along?"

Scientists will analyze the volunteers' blood and cholesterol in every way they can think of, as well as check their bone density, kidney function, body composition, exercise tolerance and more.

Despite the professions' unease at the findings so far, some of the researchers involved expect that if the Atkins approach proves safe and effective in larger, longer studies, those opinions will eventually change.

"It's difficult to swallow," says O'Brien, "but the data are the data, even if they go against 30 years of dogma."

Source: cbsnews.com

Plague of pimples blamed on bread

Eating too much refined bread and cereal, rather than chocolate and greasy foods, may be the culprit behind the pimples that plague many a youngster.

That is the theory of a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Highly processed breads and cereals are easily digested. The resulting flood of sugars makes the body produce high levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1).

This in turn leads to an excess of male hormones. These encourage pores in the skin to ooze large amounts of sebum, the greasy goop that acne-promoting bacteria love. IGF-1 also encourages skin cells called keratinocytes to multiply, a hallmark of acne, the team say in a paper that will appear in the December issue of Archives of Dermatology.

Full article: New Scientist