It was a doc that turned me on to lowcarb. Went for my physical, and my pudgy doc had buffed up. Atkins is a doc.
Docs go to the same schools and read the same journals as everyone elese, which is why they are sticking to the food pyramid for the time being. They are conservative and slow to change. And the people who run things like the American Heart Association are your typical tenured types, many of them doctors who'd do anything to escape the hard work of taking care of patients.
Lately there's been some noise about "Syndrome X" which is nothing more than a variation of Atkins. Carbohydrate Addicts is Atkins. But they don't want to give him credit because that would be admitting that they have been wrong for over thirty years.