I think Atkins theories were rejected at least in part for economic reasons. Imagine if real credit was given to his work, and the FDA started recommending low-carb diets…
Do you have any idea how much the food industry has invested in producing low-fat, high carb food? Such a radical change would completely devastate several businesses as they lost a huge amount of their customer base, and/or had to restructure their entire business. Besides, since Atkins relies heavily on animal products, and there simply aren’t that many animal products to go around, it also runs into economic problems there.
You’re right; I did mischaracterize the Atkins diet based on what I’d heard second-hand. Fruits and vegetables are allowed during the maintenance phase. I still stand by my contention that fruits and vegetables are an important part of a balanced diet.
As for fat being converted to fuel that powers the muscles…well, yeah, that’s how aerobic exercise works. Perhaps my original statement was misleading, but it is true.
Btw, I’m a chronically fat person, so I’ve been around the diet block. I’ve expended countless hours of energy in trying to lose weight the more traditional ways, and then evetually mostly gave up.
Then I read Atkin’s book, and a few others (protein power, the zone, etc), and was totally sold on the basic philosophy. It seems silly how we’ve handled nutrition… up until 100 years ago, when processed/refined/artificial foods started to really come into production, heart attacks, type 2 diabetes, etc were almost unheard of. Then, suddenly, we start pumping ourselves with artificial, refined, processed food, and we start having all sorts of medical problems… what’s the solution? Why, of course, we should stop eating whatever natural foods we have left because they’re high in (EVIL!) fat, and we should stuff ourselves with even MORE artificial processed food.
Silly.
In any case… I went from about 370 to 220 in about 8 months. It was a lot of work, and one might immeadiately say ‘that can’t be healthy!’ to that - but it was, entirely. By using conventional dieting, losing weight that fast would be entirely unhealthy, but because I’ve basically been “forcing” my body to stay fat by eating ungodly high concentrations of refined carbohydrates (which is to say, the average diet), I simply “freed” it by giving it the natural food it was meant to function on - and the weight came off like crazy, I built muscle really well, and I improved in every physical way possible.
My doctor disliked the idea of what I was doing entirely, but after quite a bit of different tests, she could not find a single aspect of my body that wasn’t entirely healthy, and 10x better than it was before. I didn’t only lose weight - that’s just a result of your body becoming healthier as a whole.
My immune system became incredibly strong (I’d walk around in cold weather with wet close just to see if I COULD get myself sick, and never did), I had a remarkable amount of stamina and energy, I was never sore even though I CONSTANTLY worked out and stuff, my cholesterol went from dangerously high to perfect (lowered HDL, raised LDL … I think), and my triglycerides were cut in 1/10th(!!) even though I was eating large amounts of bacon, sausage, etc.
In any case, that’s just my story - we really screw our bodies up by insisting on eating tons of artificial, processed food - and what Atkins (and others) advocate is basically restoring a more natural diet, what we’d eat if we didn’t have civilization, what our body evolved to eat, and the “diseases of civilization” just go away. Your body becomes as strong as it was meant to be, when it wasn’t being “weighed down” by the ingestion of ungodly amounts of carbs.
As far as whether low- or high-carb diets are better…it probably does depend significantly on what kinds of carbohydrates you’re getting. The average American eats like crap, getting most of their carbs from refined foods and simple sugars. This is a lousy diet, and they would be better off on a low-carb diet.
However, for someone like myself, who eats whole grain bread and pasta, fruits and vegetables that are high in fiber, and very few simple sugars (can’t even drink regular soda any more)…well, I’m probably doing OK with my diet. Granted, I’ve got a bit of weight to lose, but most of that will be easy to take care of with a low calorie diet.
For the record, I’m shooting for 2400 calories a day, with 50% from carbs (all from the sources outlined in the second paragraph), 30% from protein, and 20% from fat (mostly not saturated fat–think fish, nuts, and dairy). I’m male, 22 years old, 6’ (or thereabouts), and 225 pounds. Combine that with a pretty intensive exercise program, and I should be in shape pretty soon. I’ll let everyone know if it works.
Every single food you named is primarily carbohydrate. Ergo, hi carb, low fat. The quality of carbs is certainly important, beans are better than potato chips. But they both play havoc with your blood sugar, beans just slightly less so. (Glycemic index for certain beans is fairly low among carb foods, for potato chips…well, might as well just eat surgar by the spoonful.)
All true… except the “lots” - which is a relative term. Beans compared to meat? Lots. Beans compared to grass? Not so much. The fiber helps to temper the insulin reaction, but not as much you’d think.
Not at all. In fact, I’d accuse the medical establishment of that in the way they portray low-carb diets. Proof is in the pudding… or the bacon.
I don’t know why people say this. Atkins’ weight loss diet is almost completely devoid of carbohydrates! (which I don’t really advocate, by the way, over the long term. For a variety of reasons, not least being boredom.) How does that compare to a diet that reccommends 40% carbs?
In any case, the only way I have managed to lose weight in recent years is low carb. My primary care physician is an endocrinologist, and that’s what she recommended to me…keep my carbs below 40 grams a day, and I’d lose. Pretty much true.
I have refined my eating plan and continue to refine it, and in fact, I will share it with y’all when I’ve lost 100 pounds. But what I’m doing is designed to do 3 things: take off weight, improve overall health, and be pleasurable enough to work for the rest of my life. And that last is absolutely crucial, because America is littered with folks who have dropped hundreds and hundreds of pounds…over and over again. The reason is that gritting your teeth and bearing the pain can work for awhile, but eventually almost everyone goes back to the way they ate before. Most diets really don’t taste that great, particularly low-fat ones. There is a reason we like high-fat food: it tastes better! So trying to spend the rest of your life eating low fat is virtually guaranteed to fail at some point.
Which brings me back to the whole grains, veges and legumes bit. Eating whole grains, legumes, vegetables and fruits, with a bit of fish and chicken and very low fat, will probably result in some weight loss. It is also nearly impossible to sustain over the long haul for most Americans, whose palates are simply not adapted to that kind of eating. And that simply must be taken into account if we are going to talk about * effective * weight loss plans. Almost anything is effective if you apply it religiously, and nothing is if you don’t, and that is the biggest problem we face with obesity.
Stoid, you miss my very first point. Yes, the ADA recommends a high-carb, low-fat diet in the same way that Sprite commercials encourage you to drink liquids.
However, if you drink gin and tonics, you’re not following the advice of the Sprite commercials, even though you’re drinking liquids. And if you have a Wonder-bread-and-Coke diet, you’re not following the ADA’s advice, even though you’re eating a low-fat, high-carb diet. Capiche?
That’s the straw man I was talking about.
Err…what? How did grass enter into this? Grass, you may note, doesn’t have as much fiber as a hefty two-by-four. However, since we’re talking about human diets, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that “lots of fiber” means “lots of fiber relative to other common sources of food for humans.”
Especially since we’re talking about the Atkins diet, whose low-fiber recommendations fly in the face of mainstream science. You could even assume that I meant “relative to the amount of fiber in Atkins-diet foods.”
As for how fiber tempers the insuline reaction, you’ll need to be more specific than saying it doesn’t do it as much as I think. Especially since I just thought fiber, by adding bulk to your diet, made you feel full.
SenorBeef, this argument confuses me. Did you check out the cite from the World Health Organization above? This international group, which is apparently somewhat hostile to globalization, recommends exactly the same diet as the ADA and worries about the influence of the meat-heavy diet that the US exports. The United States eats more meat per capita than most other industrialized societies. The Bureau of Land Management, one of (I think) the two top landholding departments in the US (the other is the Forest Service), makes most of its revenues by leasing out grazing rights to cattle farmers. And I defy you to produce a single plant-food industry group with as much sway in Washington as the National Dairy Council.
Is the World Health Organization under the thumb of Hostess Snack Cakes? Is the BLM the only federal department that has escaped the sinister diet conspiracy? And is the conspiracy so extraordinarily ineffective that they’ve not been able to shut down a single McDonald’s, Burger King, or Pizza Hut?
This doesn’t even get into the fact that the ADA’s dietary recommendations caution AGAINST eating the refined, processed, low-fiber foods produced in such quantities by the food industry.
Whereas the “low-fat, high-carb” diet that the article rails against is a straw man, the food-industry-conspiracy is a canard. Such a conspiracy, in order to fit the facts, would need to be international (to account for the WHO), incredibly sneaky (since they recommend against refined foods, hoping that people won’t notice that part), and totally incompetent (since Americans still eat huge quantities of fat).
The good folks at howstuffworks.com are not fans of atkins. They also convincingly argue against just about all other forms of dieting as well. The gist of these articles is: You want to lose weight, eat less calories. What kind of calories you ask? (fat, carbs, etc) It doesn’t matter. 50 lbs of bricks (fat) is just as heavy as 50 lbs of feathers (carbs).
In the article linked to in the OP, the author states that if you do the math, it turns out even fats such as lard are not bad for you. They have as much good cholesterol as bad, so their only sin might be in containing a lot of calories.
Can anyone tell me if this could be true? It certainly runs contrary to everything I’ve ever read about the subject.
Just a note, if I recall correctly, Atkins actually recommends eating as much fiber as you can, as long as it doesn’t have a lot of non-fiber carbs that come with it. He even dedicates a section, if I remember, on why fiber carbs shouldn’t really be considered carbs for the purposes of the diet.
I don’t mean to sound as if I thought there was a massive conspiracy, but imagine if the FDA totally changed around it’s official outlook, and millions of people scrambling for weight loss suddenly started low carbing. A huge amount of the food industry is invested in creating special diet/low fat/etc foods - and that whole thing would be thrown away quite quickly. I’m not so sure the meat industry would hugely benefit, because they’re already consuming massive resources to produce their current output, aren’t they? How much more production could they practically create?
I’m just saying there’s a lot of infrastructure and momentum in the food industry as it is, and a large part of it is the low-fat dietizing of tons of food.
Senorbeef, I think I misunderstood your previous post; my apologies.
Still, however, I’ve not seen any evidence that the starch industry (National Potato Board, Wheat Farmers of America, Hostess Snack Cakes, etc.) has any influence at all over nutrition science. On the other hand, in my anecdotal experience, beef farmers DO have some level of influence.
I remember seeing a brochure at the clinical research center where I used to work. The resident nutritionist had put it out as part of a display on the ADA’s new dietary guidelines. And the brochure mentioned eating beef three different times, just about the only food item mentioned more than once. I flipped to the back of the brochure: sure enough, it was produced and distributed by the National Cattlemans’ Association.
And this was in one of the nation’s most highly-regarded clinical research centers.
I’m not convinced, also, that a change in dietary recommendations would play havoc with the food industry. Some of the most successful food products in our society – soft drinks, potato chips, Big Macs, doughnuts, and so on – have been on mainstream nutritionists’ shit lists for decades now, with little visible effect on their consumption. I doubt that if, for example, potato chips were suddenly condemned for their carbs instead of for their fat, that we’d see a precipitous drop in the potato chip market.
Rereading your post, you talk specifically about the diet food industry. Honestly, I doubt that too many nutritionists would be alarmed at the demise of Snackwells. Many foods that claim to be diet foods (e.g., Snackwells) are really capitalizing on the publics’ ignorance about dietary guidelines: they substitute sugar for fat and then trumpet their lowfatness. Neither lots of refined sugar nor lots of fat is compatible with mainstream nutritional guidelines.
(Stoid, when I say, “lots of refined sugar,” I mean, “lots compared to most other human foods,” not lots compared to a hummingbird feeder." When I say, “lots of fat,” I mean, “lots compared to most other human foods,” not, “lots compared to a big slab of whale blubber.”)
Thanks also for the information about Atkins’ chapter on fiber consumption. Although he might recommend eating it, I have a hard time thinking of good fiber sources that don’t have lots of carbs. Unless you’re pounding back the Metamucil or gnawing on pencils, you generally get fiber from legumes, whole grains, and fresh fruits and vegetables – all high-carbohydrate foods. How does he recommend getting fiber?
This is where people are usually misinformed about the Atkins (and other) low-carb diets. The Atkins diet does allow whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables. While whole grains and fruits will obviously be more available to people who have a better tolerance for higher carb foods, non-starchy vegetables are (and have always been) an integral part of the Atkins diet.
Here’s a link to the list of acceptable foods on the Atkins Diet. Keep in mind that this list is taken from the section covering the Induction phase, which is only 2 weeks long and is the most severely limiting (starting at no mare than 20 g of carbs per day). Once beyond this 2 week phase, the plan becomes (or should become, if done properly) highly individualized and the level of carbs being taken in rises by 5 g per day/per week until one’s personal tolerance level is determined.
As the plan progresses, here’s a link to the Atkins Carbohydrate Ladder, which lists the recommended additions that you can make to your diet to increase your carb intake level. Note that the ladder includes all of the things that you mention as being excluded from low-carb diets. They are not. The only thing that are forever excluded (at least on a regular basis…not even Dr. Atkins is so far in denial about our habits that he doesn’t concede that people will eat a piece of birthday cake or the like now and again) are refined sugar and flour.
Anyway, I won’t hijack this any longer than I have. I hope that this was helpful.
Jadis, I looked at these links, and they don’t change my opinion of Atkins. Sure, to some limited degree Atkins allows his followers to eat whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. But he does so in a very limited fashion, warning people all along about the dangers of such things – and even implies that whole grains are really dangerous to add back to a diet (they’re the last thing he recommends adding back to a diet, after fertheloveofGod alcohol).
The high-end of his recommendation for eating vegetables (3 cups a day) is about in keeping with the low end of the FDA’s recommendation (2 cups/day of nonleafy veggies or 4 cups of leafy, or some combination of the two). And he’s way under recommendation for whole grains and for fruits, obviously – especially in the first phase, but also in the rest of the diet. Considering that whole grains are generally a better source of insoluble fiber than vegetables and fruits, both phases of the diet look fiber-deficient to me. Particularly deficient in insoluble fiber.
And that’s not getting into the vitamin deficiencies: a diet poor in fruits and vegetables (and, to a lesser degree, whole grains) has real vitamin problems.
This is all to the side, of course, of the main question: does eating fat make you fat? Given the anecdotal experiences of Atkins adherents, I believe it’s an effective weight-loss tool. I’m just not convinced it’s a long-term healthy way.
DanielWithrow…To address some of your “Is it healthy” points:
The “high-end” of his recommendation of 3 cups per day of vegetables is, again, the limit for the most stringent period of the diet, not the lifelong guideline. Even if you conservatively estimate that people wind up in the 50 g range for maintenance, 50 g of carbohydrates when it’s coming from green vegetables is more veggies than the vast majority of the American public eats on a regular basis. For point of reference, it takes over 6 cups of chopped, cooked broccoli to net you 50 g of carbohydrates. If you discount fiber (which most low carb plans advocate when counting carbs, since fiber is largely indigestible), it would take 12 cups of broccoli to net you 50 g of “bio-available” carbs (nutrition info taken from the USDA Nutrient Database . Note that eating 6 cups of broccoli would provide approximately 26 g of fiber, which is the daily recommendation for fiber intake.
As for vitamin deficiencies, I can provide my own experience which you can take as you will. I use fitday.com to track my nutrition when I’m low-carbing, and the following data is an average over a month, at a time when I was still in weight-loss mode and being relatively conservative with my carb intake. For the vitamins/minerals listed, I’ve provided the RDA I achieved for each eating at the following carb level (all without supplementation):
Out of 16 recommended vitamins/minerals, I’m deficient (per the RDA) in 4, but not grossly so. I’d hardly call this a “real vitamin problem”. Honestly, I’d love to see the breakdown on the average (non-dieting) person’s nutrition, or even a low-fat dieter’s. I also admit that the fiber is low, but this can also be supplemented until one moves on to a carb level that allows a higher daily fiber content. I might add that I had absolutely no problems with regularity eating this way.
While there are certainly polarized opinions on this issue, I think that the best thing at this point would be to do the research. Anecdotes out the wazoo aren’t going to convince the people who really need convincing. While Atkins has been lambasted for being too limiting, even following Atkins at its strictest level is not the nutritional nightmare that people claim that it is.
I do believe that the resistance to low-carbing is due to the entrenched “fat is bad” mentality, and the fact that for medicine and science to do a 180 at this point would be embarrassing and cause the entire industry to lose all credibility. It has already happened on a smaller scale with a number of other big news-making items (such as the “eggs are bad…no wait, no they’re not…no wait, maybe they are…or not” flip-flop and the recent long-term study results showing that a high fiber doesn’t reduce the risk of colon cancer after all). I think that people are getting to the point where every time there’s a huge brouhaha over the latest “<insert food item here> is bad for you!!” discovery, they think “Well, that’s what you said last time about <other food item> and you changed your mind, so maybe I’ll just wait and see”.
All in all, I think that might not be such a bad thing. I believe in low-carb, but I also believe that diets are a highly individualized thing and that someone’s food tolerances are as varied as people’s food preferences. If a particular way of eating works for you, then do it. If it doesn’t, find something that does.
I, personally, got tons of fiber from walnuts - they’re loaded with fiber without many real carbs, and so I got more fiber low carbing than I did with my normal diet.
There are other good sources that I don’t recall offhand, it’s been like 2-3 years since I was into hardcore low carbing - but I know there were some nuts and some vegetables with very good carb/fiber ratios.
