You make several good points, namely that the Italians eat high fat diets with pasta and bread yet are far less obese than Americans. The difference is that our diet is very high in refined carbs, as in sugar and flour products. Most Americans have a diet that consists of as much as 60% in carbs, mostly refined. The Italians also have a high fat diet like the French, yet they are not obese like we are.
However, the Atkins diet is not a fad diet. It is simply a diet of natural, unprocessed foods sans the junk food. It is meat, vegetables, unprocessed dairy, whole grains, brown rice, fruit, nuts and beans. That is not a fad, there is nothing faddish about it. That is how people used to eat until we got on this silly low fat/high carb kick that has resulted in an epidemic of obesity and diabetes II.
This is what doctors were recommending in 1958:
There are three kinds of food: fats, proteins and carbohydrates. All of these provide calories; the fats 9.3 calories per gramme, the proteins and the carbohydrates 4.1 each. But the carbohydrates provide calories and nothing else.
Fat is the caloric reserve material of nature. The whale stores fat in his subcutaneous layers against the rigours of life at the Pole, the camel stores it in his hump against hard times in the desert, the African sheep stores it in his tail and his buttocks against the day when even the parched grass shall have withered away. But fats are more than stores of reserve caloric material. They are heat insulators, they are fillers of dead spaces, and they are facilitators of movement in rigid compartments such as the orbit, the pelvis, and the capsules of joints. They are also essential building materials. Animal fats contain three groups of substances: the neutral fats which are chiefly energy providers, the lipids containing phosphorus that enter into most tissues and bulk largely in the brain and the central nervous system, and the sterols that are the basis of most hormones.
The expert on nutrition is not the nutrition expert, but the man who has studied nutrition by the ultimate method of research, the struggle for survival. The Eskimo, living on the ice floes of the North Pole, the Red Indian travelling hard and far over wild lands in hunting or war, the trapper in the Canadian forests, the game hunters in Africa-these men must find food that gives the greatest nutritive value in the smallest bulk. If they cannot find such a diet, their journeys will be limited both in time and in distance, and they will fail in their task All these men have found that a diet of meat and animal fat alone, with no carbohydrates, with no fruit or vegetables, with no vitamins other than those they get in meat, not merely provides them with all the energy they need, but keeps them in perfect health for months at a time. Seal meat and blubber for the Eskimo, pemmican for the Indian and the trapper, biltong for the hunter, have proved to be the perfect diet both in quality and in bulk.
Read entire article at http://www.ourcivilisation.com/fat/foreword.htm
Covert Bailey who is not a person prone to deny science says that after an intense aerobic workout, nothing beats pure white sugar for restoring glycogen stores. Not because that's his opinion, but because it's been shown to be true through studies performed on professional athletes. My point is that refined carbs are only a problem if you overindulge. That is true if you overindulge in eggs, steak, cheese, beer, etc., etc.
As I noted in my first post to this thread, I eat carbs (refined and unrefined with every meal). My cholesterol is 191 with 85/HDL to 111/LDL ratio. My blood pressure is low, my resting heartrate is 56 and my bodyfat is 24%. None of this is due to my diet, it is due to my love of earning my food, and my decent genetic disposition.