http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/ny...18DIET.html?hp

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That sure is an interesting article.
I don't know why the public has the view you can eat all the meat eggs and butter you want on this diet. No one ever tells you that you can and SHOULD eat lots of veggies and low glycemic fruits on this diet though!

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>"Atkins for Life," the newest book written by Dr. Atkins and published a few months before his death last year, says: "You should always eat a balance of different types of natural fat." The precise proportion of saturated and unsaturated fat was unspecified, Ms. Heimowitz said, because "trying to tell consumers to do math is futile."<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

This struck me funny! Like if we are loaded up on fats we lose our abilty to add!

Jen

Atkins since 11/11/03

5'3" 140/130/115


I used to be indecisive...But now I'm not so sure!

ROFL@Jen

It's still difficult to get people to understand this woe. I wonder if the reason isn't because Atkins hasn't been promoted by Madison avenue as a eat all the meat you want "diet" because that sells books. I can't wait to read the lastest book. I'll borrow it from the library though because I doubt if there's anything new in it.

Rob
310/234.5/180

Me, a skeptic? I trust you have proof.

I'm pretty much dumbfounded by this whole thing.

No new research is cited as the reason for this "adjustment" to the Atkins program. All the most recent studies confirm that lipid profiles in people eating a low carb, high fat (without any restrictions on the kind of fat) diet, improve siginficantly. That's certainly been true for me. I eat lots of saturated fats, yet my lipid profile, over the last five years, has gone from high risk to low risk. My latest risk ratio was 2.3. I don't understand what they are basing this new advice on.

IMHO, the more complicated they make the program (in terms of categories and sub-categories and amounts of acceptable foods, the calculations people have to engage in to be "on plan", etc) the less likely people are to bother with it.

I'm grateful that I started out with the 1998 version of DANDR. If there had been all kinds of limits on cheese and cream (and, now, which kind of meat and how much butter I could eat) I think I'd have "passed." But that's just me.

Maggie
5'1" ~~ Atkins since '98 (160+)
Maintaining nicely (110 +/-)
~~ Redhead until further notice!

me too maggie.

I don't get it either.

I'm going to control my outrage. I know some of my posts get a little too excited at times. I'm really not happy with that article.

Dr. Atkins must be rolling over in his grave at what they have done to his diet.

They are not "clarifying" anything, as they claim. They are CHANGING the diet in a way that runs counter to many decades of preaching by Atkins. Atkins really had an axe to grind on the subject of red meat and butter and eggs. He considered them healthy foods and the popular nutritional conventional wisdom to be deeply flawed. Now, along comes Collete Heimowitz and these other blank-faced people in suits behind the cash register, and they make his diet more politically correct based on no new information. And they call it "clarifying."

Well, if they're going to do that, they should stop claiming that the New England Journal of Medicine article supports the healthiness of their diet. That study showed that Atkins CLASSIC was a good diet that improved blood lipids. This new version of the diet is untested.

I've seen this before, back when I was in Overeaters Anonymous. OA had a very healthy and successful low-carb diet called Gray Sheet. But the success of it prompted people to want to change it. In the end, internal politics caused OA to finally pronounce that it would no longer officially promote any particular type of diet.

A similar thing happened with Weight Watchers.

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to an article in the NYTimes that quoted this same Heimowitz as saying that the reason people gain weight eating Atkins bars is because they "eat too many." The next version of their Faux Atkins book probably ought to suggest counting calories to stop that little problem. And, oh yeah, bring back the food pyramid, too...

**************
"Sometimes I think you have to march right in and demand your rights, even if you don't know what your rights are, or who the person is you're talking to. Then on the way out, slam the door."