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To: Senator Pardek
If your diet is based on losing weight, go Atkins - if it's based on becoming healthy - exercise, weight train, and eat 30% carbs!

Senator Pardek, I don't find your recommendation here to be much outside of what I would expect to be healthy for most people. The carb level you propose is significantly lower than most of the mainstream dogma has promoted over the past decade or two, and I find it to be reasonable, assuming you are talking about complex carbs. I would agree that exercise is an extremely important part of the equation and that weight training is way under-emphasized among most health "experts."

What I take issue with is the absolute certainty with which you state your superior "knowledge," and that you state it with zero qualifications. Furthermore, you make no exceptions for people with disturbed carbohydrate metabolism and seem to suggest that your recommendations will work for everybody, regardless of their condition.

Your pro athlete challenge is not only silly, it is logically ignorant. When discussions like this arise, they are generally talking about either average people or those who are in a state of obesity and need to lose weight. Professional athletes are neither and would make a horrible representative sample upon which to make conclusions for all of us. Furthermore, the article here has pointed out that we are beginning to see the metadata with respect to high carbohydrate diets and the results are not pretty - hence the actual title. You take a much more moderate approach than the silly "eat all the carbs you want and restrict your fat to near zero" approach that we have seen over the years. While I would call this approach more moderate, the mainstream would not. In fact, your 30% carbs is lower than that proposed by Dr. Sears in his Zone diet I believe. So by mainstream standards, your diet can easily be characterized as "weird" itself.

I would never state as fact that any one particular diet makes sense for everybody, as diet is a very individualized thing. I know people who can thrive on a high carbohydrate diet and I know people who can't (myself included), regardless of whether exercise is involved or not. Once again, I view your recommendations as quite low and reasonable for most people, but possibly not sufficiently low enough for many.

Atkins, or other low carb diets, often help to correct desensitize insulin receptors, which allows people to slowly resume eating a higher level of carbs. Many of your statements continue to be quite hyperbolic, misleading and utterly misleading with respect to Dr. Atkins' recommendations and I believe you know this. Why you feel it necessary to attack something that many have found to be very helpful with the harshness of a religious zealot is beyond me, but I suspect most reading your posts have already determined that you are less interested in discovering truth, educating folks, or answering questions and are more intersted in convincing people that Atkins is the Devil incarnate. Again, I have no idea why, but your intellectual dishonesty and dogmatic approach to the whole debate is quite tiring.

Finally, as I've seen you do with my previous posts, this article, responses to others on this thread and most clearly throughout the thread the actual Atkins protocol itself, I am not sure that you will bother to read what I've said, before responding once again with your unqualified and unsubstatiated statements of certain facts. It that is the case, I will end the discussion because you are clearly not interested in having one.

317 posted on 07/07/2002 12:14:24 AM PDT by bluefish
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To: bluefish
Good analysis. Loop back to where the problem originated.

Senator Pardek is like a real Senator. They like to proclaim that such and such is a huckster (see post #7) or harming people or wrong and then they propose to solve the problem. The Senators, like other members of congress manufacture problems so they can solve them and thus justify their jobs and unearned paychecks. They like to proclaim, "I'll use the government to compassionately protect the little guy."  In reality, they create problems that need not exist.

Politicians and bureaucrats create and implement roughly 3,000 new laws and regulations each year. That number increases on average from one year to the next. Each year they tell us that the new laws are "must-have laws" that people and society can't prosper without. They do that, so they imply, to keep people from running society headlong into destruction.

Yet how is it that citizens and the society they make up has managed to not only survive but increase prosperity when they didn't have this year's 3,000 new laws last year or for decades before? Likewise, how did citizens increase prosperity for decades prior to last year's 3,000 new must-have laws? And they do that despite a mountain of laws that they've already been saddled/burdened with. Thirty new laws a year is probably overkill. But 3,000 is insane.

During Clintons eight years in the White House alone, there were 25,000 new laws and regulations created. How many of those laws did you break? With that many laws piled on top of the ones that already existed virtually every citizen is a criminal.

However, if in a day it was physically possible to apprehended even one quarter of those lawbreakers society would come to a screeching halt. Yet with all these supposed criminals on the lose prosperity continues to increase.

Seems obvious that lobbyists and special interest groups seeking to buy access to government power in order to gain unfair competitive advantages would be non existent if politicians weren't putting government power up for sale in the first place. They sell the "little guys" snake oil (for example, a bogus/unhealthy dietary guide) while they sell access to government power to their big money donors/supporters.

319 posted on 07/07/2002 6:02:05 AM PDT by Zon
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To: bluefish; jennyp; Senator Pardek
I'll note thaat competitive bodybuilders almost always use the extreme low-carb diet in the last few months of contest preparation to cut up (lose fat). As bluefish noted, though, they aren't exactly representative....they are genetic freaks when it comes to building muscle, and are always on drugs to help anabolism (and decrease catabolism). Take it for what it is worth.

More interesting to me is the vehemence with which people cling to one view or another, both in this thread and the NY Times article. If it were an argument over creationism vs. evolution or some such, that would be understandable (worldviews are questioned). Dieting is not exactly trivial, but people cannot seem to be objective about it.
324 posted on 07/07/2002 10:53:18 AM PDT by NukeMan
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