BTW, you believe anything written in the NYT?
I thought this article, in today's NYT, about Atkins, was interesting (it also mentioned South Beach Diet but I deleted that part):
Atkins Diet Saga Now at Chapter 11
FOR more than two decades, Dr. Robert C. Atkins was a pioneering, yet simple diet doctor. He wrote best-selling books, saw patients daily at his alternative medicine center in Manhattan and had a regular radio show. There was no high-profile company and there were no products with his name on them in supermarkets all across America.
Maybe it should have stayed that way.
On Sunday, what started out as a modest attempt to create products for patients on low-carbohydrate diets unraveled into a $300 million corporate mess, with Atkins Nutritionals, the company Dr. Atkins founded in 1989, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
In the face of declining numbers of low-carb dieters, there was some question whether the nutritional philosophy of Dr. Atkins, who died in 2003, was really served by a company that worked aggressively to hawk low-carb candy bars, desserts, frozen dinners and shakes.
"Dr. Atkins had amazing success with patients and that was his true life's work," said Dr. Stuart Fischer, who was associate medical director at the Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine from 1988 to 1997.
"His legacy is not all these products," Dr. Fischer said. "But unfortunately the more people hear about bankruptcy and products disappearing from shelves, the more that is what they are going to remember."
It is hard to pinpoint where exactly Atkins Nutritionals went wrong and what could have been done differently to avoid the current situation, but industry experts say that rapid expansion in the middle of the low-carb craze did not help. While Atkins Nutritionals was founded by Dr. Atkins in the late 80's, the company did not sell its first food product until 1997. For the first eight years, the company was a sleepy operation, selling vitamins and other supplements directly to patients and in some natural foods stores....
One spot of good news from the Atkins saga is that the sale of the company left the Dr. Robert C. Atkins Foundation, which finances research on nutrition, obesity and obesity-related diseases, well provided for. It is flush with $50 million and will get another $450 million when Dr. Atkins's widow dies.
Dr. Eric Braverman, who once served as chief of medical research for the Atkins Center and worked with Dr. Atkins on and off for 20 years, said that this would have pleased Dr. Atkins.
"He had a vision of a new medicine and of the role diet plays in some of our biggest medical problems," Dr. Braverman said.