Posted on 01/13/2004 12:11:30 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
And the Lord spoke, saying, "Thou shalt feast upon my creations until thy belly becomes too fat and bloated to see thy feet. Then thou shalt make a pilgrimage to Borders, and there thou shalt find the holiest book to relieve thy fast-food indiscretions."
What the good man upstairs is talking about, my babies, is the high-fat, low-carb Atkins diet, the latest underground craze to go public since Saddam. The Atkins diet consists of eating fatty, high-protein foods while waving bye-bye to carbohydrates and sugars. Carbohydrates are those things found in bread, pasta, potatoes, fruits, etc.
Instead of cereal for breakfast, you cook sausage patties, bacon and ham, which I recently learned came from the same magical animal. Wrap your burgers in lettuce instead of a bun for lunch and have lots and lots of meat for dinner.
If this doesn't sound like your kind of thing, just look at the results it brings. "Dateline NBC" recently aired a story called "Losing it: Dateline Ultimate Diet Challenge" in which six people who graduated in 1978 from Quincy High School in Massachusetts were followed as they tried to lose weight in the months leading up to their 25th reunion.
Each person chose a different way to lose her weight, with the horizontally challenged selecting everything from Slim-Fast to marathon running. One guy even had himself hypnotized into eating right and exercising. But the Atkins stud lost the most, dropping a massive 108 pounds. That's a Cowboys cheerleader!
Richard Atkins' diet book has been around since the ‘70s and has been on the best-seller list since the Clinton administration. Now it seems every food outlet, restaurant and fast-food place is catering to those Atkinites and watching their weight and carbs for them. The diet has blown up bigger than Ricky Martin.
Maybe Houston (named the fattest city in the United States three years running by Men's Fitness Magazine) will finally shed those lone star pounds and stop being the city all the other cities make fun of for wearing mu-mu's and having to wash its back with a towel-wrapped plunger.
Maybe now Chicago (No. 2 on the list) will stop waiting until all the other cities are done to take a shower for fear of getting its flabby butt flicked with a wet wash cloth.
Subway has introduced Atkins-friendly wraps. (Camera shot of little freckled boy taking a bite of the Chicken Bacon Ranch Wrap.) They're as delicious as they are nutritious (thumbs up)! It's a quality sandwich from the place that gave birth to Jerod-mania.
All are jumping on the Atkin-wagon. McDonald's and Wendy's are pushing their salads, and Hardees has come out with Atkins-friendly burgers wrapped in lettuce instead of carbohydrate-heavy bread buns.
Have we all turned Communist? A wrap from Subway is one thing, but going commercial with Atkins burgers is entirely another thing. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I believe we should worship the moon and sun as powerful gods. And I also believe that the American institution known as the fast-food burger should not be stripped down to the nubs like a husbandless J-Lo.
Do what you want in the privacy of your own home (I've been known to wrap a slice of Iron Kids bread around a hot dog if I'm desperate), but to air your dirty laundry in public like this is an outrage.
Meat, cheese and lettuce does not a burger make!
On top of that, Scott Blank, a registered dietitian at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center, said that the diet could hurt your kidneys because the high amounts of protein build up excess amounts of nitrogen in the body, which has to be processed through the kidneys.
Not to mention that people are now piling on the mayonnaise and leaving the fruits alone, which could be clogging up their arteries like a bunch of Horatio Sanz and all of his brothers and cousins falling down a well.
Although a little fat in your diet is healthy, you’re not going to convince me that the Tub O’ Lard my grandmother gets from Sam’s Club to make her famous Fried Heart Attack Chicken is more healthy than a bowl of peas.
I know I can’t eat mayonnaise by itself. I leave that to Europeans and those people who have eating competitions on ESPN2. Even the Atkins stud from “Dateline NBC” developed a bad case of gout half-way through his so-called healthy diet. Is that what I’ll get if I want to look better in Under Armor? Gout?!
Health risks aside, this Atkins craze is just one of a bajillion other dieting fads that will eventually rest on the back-burner. I just hope the bubble bursts on this dieting craze before they have to shut down Fazoli's. No man should endure life without free breadsticks.
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Evan Kelsay is a sophomore in the School of Management. He can be reached at opinoins@purdueexponent.org
Indeed!
It's working for millions. And their blood numbers are defying anti-Atkins criticism. If the diet is followed (not just made it up from what people have read in news accounts) gout will not happen - drink plenty of water.
The lipid profile changes are simply from the short term weight change - not the specific diet. Any weight loss from almost any diet will show similar results in the short term. In the long term, the high fat intake on the Atkins diet is already giving indications of a lipid rebound, often to higher levels than before.
There are potential problems with the Atkins diet. There is too much research that shows diets continually high in fat, especially saturated, contribute to cardiac and cardiopulmonary disease. The continuous high protein intake raises concerns over ketoacidotic side-effects and renal complications, especially for those with existing renal compromise. The Atkins diet raises the probablity of kidney stones. Even glomerular permeability damage may occur. The high meat diets are linked with colon cancer and osteoporosis.
There haven't been sufficient studies. The few studies done have used too small groups and non-randomized selections. The drop-out rates were too high. No longitudinal studies have been done. The studies on high fat or high protein in diets alone (not combined like Atkins) have shown them to not work and even be dangerous. The articles supporting the Atkins diet have been criticized by Science, JAMA, JADA, and the AMA as misleading, grossly incorrect, biochemically incorrect, without scientific merit, and requiring a thermodynamic miracle to work.
There is only one way to safely and permanently lose weight and keep it off. Reduce caloric intake, with a balanced diet, below current weight maintenance requirements and increase exercise. That way the weight is lost slowly, allowing the leptin-hypothalamic system to reset to the lower weight levels and nutritional requirements are maintained.
Fad diets are notorious as failures and some for their dangers. Mostly because they are based on false premises and a gimmick for quick and easy weight loss.
What? Can you try writing it in layman's terms? - oh, yeah, here is the copy - eating red meat is bad for you - so don't do it! /sarcasm
I checked the carbs in what I eat, and it's almost impossible to stay below that 100% on labels with added sugars or processed breads.
I distrust any diet initiative when corporations get involved. Just like "healthy" yogurts now contain up to 50 grams of sugar and "healthy" frozen dinners have pasta, corn, and sugars, they'll do the same things with the Atkins foods. Soon there will be so much grease and salt in them for taste that they'll cause more problems than they solve.
Then, we'll be seeing the lawsuits because some idiots croak from topping a plateful of hamburger with melted butter and heavy cream or whatever.
I'm in week two of induction right now. I know I've lost some weight (the clothes fit better), but I don't really know how much. I just bought a scale this past weekend, and I was surprised that I weighed as much as I did, so I think I have to face up that I was getting to be a porker.
I'm kinda modifying induction now, eating more variety in the veggies, but still on the "safe" list. I had a good quanitity of a yellow squash, zuccini, and mushroom sautee last night with my pot roast, and it was heaven. I think I started out too strictly... the only veggies I had the first week were the salad lettuce.
It just seemed odd that I could eat all the pork rinds I wanted, but had to measure my salad out in a cup.
Yes, how bizarre, getting his name wrong!!!
And as for the "fad" accusation, the low carb diet has been traced back even farther, to 1862 and a William Banting. Banting was an English insurance undertaker and carpenter, [what a combination?] who fought his own largess battle with success via a low carb diet. He then wrote a 22 page book called, _Letter on Corpulence_.
I wonder if Dr. Atkins had read anything from Wm. Banting? Anyway it proves that coming up with something entirely new in this area of nutrition is pretty much impossible.
And FWIW I have been using Atkins principles, limiting my carb intake for two years now and am able to maintain my goal weight. Low carb works well.
I bought a low-carb BBQ sauce the other day (I use it more like ketchup or steak sauce), and it was pretty good, too. I told my wife it only saved 7 carbs a serving over what I had been using, but with that 7 carbs, I could have a low-carb muffin with supper, too, and still "turn a profit," So really, for me, it's all been about being aware of what I'm eating.
Knowing what I eat lets me find ways to maximize eating pleasure (I love to eat!)and still stay in the guidelines and lose.
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