The Atkins Diet:
A Brief Overview
What is The Atkins Diet?
- A lifetime nutritional philosophy, focusing on the consumption of
nutrient-dense, unprocessed foods and vita-nutrient supplementation.
The Atkins diet restricts processed/refined carbohydrates (which
make up over 50% of many people's diets), such as high-sugar foods,
breads, pasta, cereal, and starchy vegetables. Core vita-nutrient
supplementation includes a full-spectrum multi-vitamin and an
essential oils/fatty acid formula.
- A lifetime nutritional philosophy that has been embraced by an
estimated 20+ million people worldwide since the release of Dr.
Atkins' Diet Revolution in the 1970s.
- The cornerstone of the treatment protocols for over 60,000
patients of The Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine in New York
City.
The Major Benefits of the Diet, In Short
Diets high in sugar and refined carbohydrates like bread, pasta,
cereal, and other mainly "low-fat" processed foods increase
your body's production of insulin. When insulin is at high levels in the
body, the food you eat can get readily converted into body fat, in the
form of triglycerides (to top it off, high triglyceride levels in the
body are one of the greatest risk factors for heart disease).
Even worse, high carbohydrate meals tend to leave you less satisfied
than those that contain adequate fat levels; so you eat more and get
hungrier sooner. If you find this hard to believe, think about how much
pasta you can eat at lunch and then how hungry you are running to the
vending machine for another "carbo-fix" in the mid-afternoon.
If the pasta you ate was really giving your body what it needed, you
would stay full until dinner time. So the typical low-protein, low-fat
meal leaves you eating more and hungry sooner.
So what should you do? Get off the insulin generating roller coaster
of the low-fat diet and start cutting down on your carbohydrate
consumption, especially the worst offenders: sugar, white flour and
other refined carbohydrate-based products. What can you expect from
this? Three wonderful results:
- You'll start to burn fat for energy: Since carbohydrates
are the body's primary energy source, you'll rarely use your
secondary energy source, you own body fat, for energy unless you
restrict carbohydrate consumption. This offers a lifetime of body
fat burning, which is the goal of most people trying to lose weight.
- You won't feel hungry in between meals: The biggest battle
that most people have with weight loss is the constant obsession
with food (for example, if you've ever thought about dinner when
you're eating lunch). Again, much of this is caused by blood sugar
fluctuations that are aggravated by carbohydrate consumption
(especially the refined kind). By cutting the carbs, you'll maintain
a more even blood sugar level throughout the day. No more false
hunger pains or mid-afternoon brain drains.
- Your overall health will improve and you'll feel better:
Many of the toxins you take into your body are stored in your fat
cells. By getting your body to burn stored fat, you allow it to
clean itself out. Combined with the benefits of stable blood sugar,
the end result is that many common ailments you have been
experiencing could well be alleviated. Fatigue, irritability,
depression, headaches, and even many forms of joint and muscular
pain simply go away. Furthermore, you should see a significant
improvement in your blood profile, (including cholesterol and blood
pressure levels). All this leads to better health and well-being--
something all of us strive to bring into our lives.
Key Information About Sugar
It contains no vitamins. No minerals. It is 100% carbohydrate. So it
must be metabolized immediately. The stores of nutrients built up in
your body are called out like militia men, to "charge" the
sugar, and similar forms like glucose and fructose, and turn it into
ready energy, depleting your body in the process. Sugar is an energy
sucker: the Anti-Nutrient.
White flour is its second-cousin—almost as bad. When you partner
the two together— flour and sugar—it spells disaster for anyone
trying to maintain a healthy body, let alone someone who is fighting
disease or trying to lose weight. If they are consumed on a regular
basis, the body is in a constant state of nutritional deficiency. If you
don't believe that sugar is an anti-nutrient, try having a rich dessert
after dinner on a night you're feeling under the weather – you'll be
sure to wake up the next morning with a full-blown illness.
What's frightening is that in recent years, the government and other
advisory groups like the American Medical Association have encouraged
the consumption of flour by unveiling a new food pyramid that is based
on grains and recommends six to eleven servings a day. And no
distinction is made between white processed flour, which is stripped of
the nutrients, especially important trace minerals, and the much more
healthy whole grains (unless you have a food allergy). And the result?
Americans now think they're making healthy choices by loading up on
cereals, pasta, crackers and breads. We even have products like
Pop-Tarts®, with 39 grams of carbohydrate, 20 of which are sugar,
carrying the American Heart Association Seal Of Approval. It is a
travesty.
So how do we protect ourselves and stay healthy? One thing we can do
is eat a healthy, balanced diet of low-carbohydrate foods. And when our
foods fail us, as they often do after being picked, shipped, stripped,
processed and packaged, we can protect ourselves with solid
vita-nutrient support. It is critical that you include this extra
"insurance policy" to take you into the kind of healthy life
we all want to lead.
(Pop-Tarts® is a registered trademark of Kellogg's USA, Inc.)
Answering The Critics
While mainstream medicine and nutrition have, on the whole,
criticized the Atkins Diet, the facts speak for themselves:
- Dr. Atkins and his colleagues at The Atkins Center for
Complementary Medicine in New York have treated over 60,000 patients
using the Atkins Diet as a primary protocol. These patients
experience all the beneficial effects detailed above, as well as
improved blood pressure, lower cholesterol, and a lower or
completely eradicated dependence on prescription drugs.
- While the mainstream critics continue to lament the consumption of
fat as the root of America's weight problem, only carbohydrate
consumption (mostly refined) has increased in the past few decades,
while fat consumption has declined (as the "low-fat/high carb"
diet has been promoted as the best nutritional option for every
living person). During this time:
- Obesity, which in the past had consistently applied to about
25% of the population,increased to 33%
- Heart disease now accounts for 50% of all deaths, up from 40%
in the 1970s
- Cases of diabetes are growing in near epidemic proportions (in
fact, children are now contracting adult-onset diabetes)
- Hypertension, chronic fatigue and attention-deficit-disorder
are now well recognized conditions.
All of these conditions are linked not by the amount of fat in
ones diet, but by blood sugar disturbances and insulin disorders
caused by excessive refined carbohydrate consumption (FYI: The
average person now consumes over 150 pounds of sugar a year, up from
less then 10 pounds in the 19th century).
- While medical and nutritional journals are filled with studies
documenting the body's requirement of essential fatty acids and
essential amino acids (derived from protein), there is no such thing
as an essential carbohydrate. Why then does the FDA recommend an
average of 16 servings a day?
- The Atkins Diet is not a no-carbohydrate diet. The diet focuses on
very limited consumption of the types of carbohydrates that tend to
spike blood sugar levels the most, including non-whole grain bread,
pastas, refined sugar products, juices, and high sugar/starchy
fruits and vegetables. Atkins Dieters learn to determine their
personal sensitivity to carbohydrates, as a way to manage their
weight and health for life.
Scientific References Related to a Low-Carbohydrate Eating
Philosophy (such as the Atkins Diet):
ON CANCER:
"Saturated fat was not associated with the risk of breast
cancer"…"we found no positive association between intake of
total fat and risk of invasive breast cancer". *
*Reference: Wolk, A. et al, Archives of Internal Medicine
1998; 158:41-45
"We found no evidence of a positive association between
total dietary fat intake and the risk of breast cancer. There was no
reduction in risk even among women whose energy intake from fat was less
than 20 percent of total energy intake. In the context of the Western
lifestyle, lowering the total intake of fat in midlife is unlikely to
reduce the risk of breast cancer substantially."*
*Reference: Hunter D. et al, New England Journal of Medicine,
1996; 334:356-61
"The risk of breast cancer decreased with increasing total
fat intake (trend p0.01) whereas the risk increase with increasing
intake of available carbohydrates (trend p=0.002)"…"The
findings also suggest a possible risk, in southern European populations,
of reliance on a diet largely based on starch."*
*Reference: Franceschi S. et al, Lancet 1996; 347: 1351-56
"Sugar consumption is positively associated with cancer in
humans and test animals.* Tumors are know to be enormous sugar
absorbers."
—Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions 1995 Promotion Publishing
*Reference: Beasley, Joseph D, MD and Jerry J Swift, MA The Kellogg
Report, 1989 The Institute of Health Policy and Practice,
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 129.
"Johns Hopkins researchers have found evidence that some
cancer cells are such incredible sugar junkies that they'll
self-destruct when deprived of glucose, their biological sweet of
choice"..."Scientists have long suspected that the cancer
cell's heavy reliance on glucose, its main source of strength and
vitality, also could be one of its great weaknesses, and Dang's new
results are among the most direct proofs yet of the idea."*
—Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions' news release
*Reference: Shim H, Dang C, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences USA, 1998 Feb 17; 95(4): 1511-1516.
ON CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE:
"Hence, many observations indicating reductions in plasma
lipid levels when people are on low-fat diets may be due to changes in
the fatty acid composition of the diet, not the reduction of fat
calories."*
*Reference: Nelson, GJ, et al, Lipids, "Low-Fat
Diets do not Lower Plasma Cholesterol Levels in Healthy Men Compared to
High-Fat Diets With Similar Fatty Acid Composition at Constant Caloric
Intake" 1995 Nov; 30(11): 969-76.
"In Framingham, Mass, the more saturated fat one ate, the
more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the
person's serum cholesterol…we found that the people who ate the most
cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed
the least and were the most physically active."*
*Reference: Castelli, William, Archives of Internal Medicine,
1992 Jul; 152(7): 1371-1372
"Abnormalities in glucose and insulin metabolism are
commonly found in patients with high blood pressure
[1-9]"…"there is evidence suggesting that defects in glucose
and insulin metabolism may play a role in both the origin and the
natural history of high blood pressure."*
*Reference: Reaven G. et al, The American Journal of Medicine
1989; 87(supp 6A):6A-2S
"If, as we had been told, heart disease results from the
consumption of saturated fats, one would expect to find a corresponding
increase in animal fat in the American diet. Actually the reverse is
true. During the sixty year period from 1910 to 1970, the proportion of
traditional animal fat in the American diet plummeted from 83% to 62%,
the proportion of butter consumption from 18 pounds per person per year
to 4. During the past eighty years dietary vegetable fat in the form of
margarine, shortening and refined oils increase about 400% and the
consumption of sugar and processed foods increase about 60%."*
—Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions 1995 Promotion Publishing
*Reference: US Department of Agriculture statistics quoted in Douglass,
William Campbell, MD The Milk of Human Kindness is Not Pasteurized,
1985 Copple House Books, Lakemont, Georgia, 184; and in Beasley, Joseph
D, MD and Jerry J Swift, MA The Kellogg Report, 1989 The
Institute of Health Policy and Practice, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York,
144.
"In the United States, 315 of every 100,000 middle aged
men die of heart attacks each year; in France the rate is 145 per
100,000. In the Gascony region, where goose and duck liver form a staple
of the diet, this rate is a remarkably low 80 per 100,000." *
—Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions 1995 Promotion Publishing
*Reference: The New York Times, November 17, 1991
"More plagues than heart disease can be laid at sugar's
door. A survey of medical journals in the 1970's produced findings
implicating sugar as a causative factor in kidney disease, liver
disease, shortened life-span, increased desire for coffee and tobacco,
as well as atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease.*"
—Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions 1995 Promotion Publishing
*Reference: Howell, Edward, MD Enzyme Nutrition 1985 Avery
Publishing Group, Inc
"Medical Research Council survey showed that men eating
butter ran half the risk of developing heart disease as those using
margarine."*
—Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions 1995 Promotion Publishing
*Reference: Nutrition Week March 22, 1991 21:12:2-3
ON DIABETES:
"These results suggest that a high protein,
low-carbohydrate diet, with nutritional supplementation can be useful to
reduce several cardiovascular risk factors in obese adult onset diabetic
patients including weight, blood sugar and lipid parameters. There is
also no evidence that the nutritional regimen adversely affects kidney
function."*
*Reference: Edman, JS et al. Journal of the American College of
Nutrition, to be published in October 1998.
"it seems prudent to avoid the use of low-fat,
high-carbohydrate diets containing moderate amounts of sucrose in
patients with non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus." *
*Reference: Coulston, A.M. et al, American Journal of Medicine
1987 Feb; 82(2):213-220.
"As compared with the high-carbohydrate diet, the
high-monounsaturated-fat diet resulted in lower mean plasma glucose
levels and reduced insulin requirements, lower levels of plasma
triglycerides and very low-density lipo-protein cholesterol , and higher
levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL)(good) cholesterol. Levels of
total cholesterol did not differ significantly in patients on the two
diets." *
*Reference: Garg, A. et. al, New England Journal of Medicine
1988; 319 (13): 829-34).
"A very high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet has been shown to
have astounding effects in helping type 2 diabetics lose weight and
improve their blood lipid profiles. 'The thing many diabetics coming
into the office don't realize is that other forms of carbohydrates will
increase their sugar, too. Dieticians will point toward complex
carbohydrates ... oatmeal and whole wheat bread, but we have to deliver
the message that these are carbohydrates that increase blood sugars,
too."*
*Referance: 81st Annual Meeting of The Endocrine Society
June 12-15, 1999 San Diego, California
ON STROKE:
"Intakes of fat, saturated fat, and monosaturated fat were
associated with reduced risk of ischemic stroke in men."* (design
and setting from the Framingham Heart Study)
*Reference: Gillman M. et al, Journal of the American Medical
Association, 1997; 78(24): 2145-2150
ON THE LOW-FAT DIET:
"Low-fat diets low in polyunsaturated fatty acids induce
essential fatty acid (EFA) insufficiency, and can increase the
biochemical risk factors for heart disease: they may also increase
appetite." *
*Reference: Siguel, E. BioMedicina, January 1998; 1(1): 9
"low-fat, high carbohydrate diets also reduce high-density
lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels and raise fasting levels of
triglycerides."*
*Reference: Mensink RP, et al, Arteriorscler Thromb 1992
Aug;12(8): 911-919
"Hence, many earlier observations indicating reductions in
plasma lipid levels when people are on low-fat diets may be due to
changes in the fatty acid composition of the diet, not the reduction in
fat calories." *
*Reference: Nelson, G.J. et al., Lipids 1995; 30(11):
969-976.
"The relative good health of the Japanese, who have the
longest life-span in the world, is generally attributed to a low-fat
diet"…"Those who point to Japanese statistics to promote the
low-fat diet fail to mention that the Swiss live almost as long on one
of the fattiest diets in the world. Tied for third in the longevity are
Austria and Greece—both with high fat diets."*
—Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions 1995 Promotion Publishing
*Reference: Moore, Thomas J Lifespan: What Really Affects Human
Longevity, 1990 Simon & Schuster, New York
"Mother's milk contains a higher portion of cholesterol
than almost any other food. It also contains over 50% of its calories as
fat, much of it saturated fat. Both cholesterol and saturated fat are
essential for growth in babies and children, especially development of
the brain.* Yet, the American Heart Association is now recommending a
low-cholesterol, low-fat diet for children!"
—Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions 1995 Promotion Publishing
*Reference:Alfin-Slater, RB and L Aftergood, "Lipids", Modern
Nutrition in Health and Disease, Chapter 5, 6th ed, RS Goodhart and
ME Shils, eds, Lea and Febiger, Philadelphia 1980, p. 31
"…there is still the potential for low-fat intakes to
adversely affect the nutritional adequacy of the diet of
children…Given the assumption that there are some potential
nutritional dangers associated with the unsupervised use of such diets,
with no proven benefits, this diet should definitely not be advocated
for infants and young children." *
*Reference: Zlotkin, SH Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 1997;151:962-963
"In 1821 the average sugar intake in America was 10 pounds
per person per year; today it is 170 pounds per person, over one fourth
the average caloric intake. Another large fraction of all calories comes
from refined flour and refined vegetable oils."*
—Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions 1995 Promotion Publishing
*Reference: Beasley, Joseph D, MD and Jerry J Swift, MA The Kellogg
Report, 1989 The Institute of Health Policy and Practice,
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 144-145
If you come across additional helpful research, please let
us know! To e-mail us, click on the "Atkins Diet E-Mail" link
at the bottom of this page.
Vocal Supporters NeededWe receive letters
each week from "Atkins Supporters" alerting us to
misinformation by the media about our work at The Atkins Center. This is
especially true for The Atkins Diet. While our low carbohydrate eating
philosophy has helped millions of people achieve long term health, and
it is starting to be embraced by more and more independent thinkers in
the medical profession, much of the media still relies on the "one
low-fat diet fits all" medical and nutritional establishment to
shape their opinion of The Atkins Diet. While we do all we can at The
Atkins Center to educate the media on the effectiveness of The Atkins
Diet, we need your help. If you come across negative press on Dr. Atkins
medical and nutritional philosophies that you disagree with, send the
media source your comments and personal story. A flood of such letters
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media to "sit up and take notice" of the good we are doing as
our efforts here. Feel free to send us a copy of these letters, as well.
Thanks in advance for your continued support.
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