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The Low-Carbohydrate Diet: Is it All That it's Cracked Up to Be? The Low-Carb Diet Has Been Around for More Than 150 Years
The Most Popular Version of the Low-Carbohydrate Diet is Dr. Atkins's Version Since the low-carbohydrate diet became popular in 2002, more people are turning to it for their weight loss salvation. Dr. Atkins's plan is the most known and the one most people follow. But, his plan has fatal flaws, the primary one being his refusal to accept the calorie theory. The main problem in having a cardiologist like Atkins design a program is that he's not trainied in matters of diet. For the most part, he just copied work by his predecessors to design the plan. Now, I'm not saying the low-carbohydrate diet isn't the way to go, I'm just saying Atkins's Plan isn't the way to go.
We Need an Analysis of the Historical Roots of the Low-Carbohydrate Diet and the Venom Directed Toward It I have several pages on this site devoted to helping you understand the low-carbohydrate diet:
The first national exposure to the low-carb diet was an article published in Holiday magazine in September 1951. The writer was a medical doctor named Pennington who had been the medical director at the DuPont Company in Wilmington, DE. Pennington made an effort to explain why the diet worked, but was unable to do a very good job. Understanding nutritional biochemistry is beyond the training of most medical doctors and, in 1951, much of the biochemistry needed to really understand why the diet worked wasn't yet available. In fact, the principal facts needed weren't published until about 1980, some eight years after Atkins released his first book. William Banting in England published the first work on carbohydrate restriction in 1864. But it was Dr. John Yudkin, a nutritionist/medical doctor, who really got it right with the publication in 1964 of his book Lose Weight, Feel Great.
Surging Interest in "Eating for Health" Grew Exponentially at This Time In 1953, Dr. Ancel Keys of the University of Minnesota published a paper called the Seven Countries Study implicating fat and cholesterol as causes of heart disease. This started it all off and today the world still believes that these substances cause heart disease. It only took about two years for other scientists to show that Keys's research was flawed. There were actually 22 countries to study but Keys hand-picked the ones he needed to paint his story. That's as simple as it gets: it was always wrong that fat and cholesterol are involved in heart disease. It's very easy to confirm this if you want to pursue it further. To start, just search "Cholesterol Myths." Dr. Yudkin, in fact, was one of the scientists who showed that Dr. Keys was wrong. Enter Dr. Robert Atkins in 1972. So, you can see where we were; by 1972, fat and cholesterol were condemned so you can imagine the quagmire that embroiled Dr. Atkins. This was further compounded by the fact that Atkins claimed one could eat as much as he wanted, even 5,000 calories per day, and still lose weight. This further rankled the medical mainstream because if there's one tenet of nutritional science that's pure bedrock it's that Calories Do Count.
From Here On Out it Really Got Ugly So the battle lines were drawn: the American Medical Establishment (against fat) and Atkins (supporting fat consumption). Yet, Yudkin had already shown in a published paper that fat intake on a low-carbohydrate diet was no more than that on a typical diet, but this was missed by everyone. It's still missed today and everyone believes that a low-carb diet will increase your intake of the so-called "deadly" saturated fats. Also missed was that several studies in the 1970's showed that the saturated fat in eggs and beef had no effect on cholesterol. This war continues unabated today.
New York Times Sunday Magazine Blows the Pot-Lid Off A journalist wrote an article published on July 7, 2002 in the New York Sunday Times magazine, What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? A frenzy ensued over Gary Taubes's contention that the attack against Atkins (more globally, against fat and cholesterol) had been conjured up. Read my point:counterpoint to Taubes's article here.
The Walls are Starting to Crumble Today On July 17, 2008, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article titled, Weight Loss with a Low-Carbohydrate, Mediterranean, or Low-Fat Diet in which a comparison was made for a two-year dietary period between a low-carb diet, low-fat diet, and the Mediterranean diet: Weight
Loss with a Low-Carbohydrate, Mediterranean, or Low-Fat
Diet
Low-carb won -- hands down. The low-carb people, who ate the most fat and cholesterol, lost the most weight and had the lowest cholesterol! And, since these researchers have no real knowledge of how to apply this diet, they blindly followed Atkins's version, not aware of it's flaws. For example, the paper showed that the low-carb subjects consumed 40% of their calories as carbs which IS NOT a low-carb diet. Dr. Jeff Volek has shown the same blood fat and sugar improvements in his elegant studies at the University of Connecticut during the last few years. Also, studies during the last 50 years have shown the same results, but no one ever talked about them.
How Long Will it Take? We've been so deeply indoctrinated with the idea that fat and cholesterol are killers that it'll really take quite awhile until we can let go of these fabricated notions. I have two people right now who've been following my low-carb plan for several months and each has made incredible gains. One is an endurance athlete and her times have dropped big time. She can't believe it. Guess what? She has fear that she's harming her health. The other wants to get his blood drawn to see what his cholesterol is. What's my point? Both tried and succeeded but neither believed my complete message. I've covered all of what's written on this page in detail in my books in an effort to alleviate people of their fear in using this diet protocol. Both were just thrilled with the release of the NEJM article. Will that be enough? How much more will it take? My low-carbohydrate plan overcomes all the pitfalls of the Atkins's plan, and there are many which I'll cover on a page devoted to Dr. Atkins and some of the other low-carb plans. I did them all, don't reinvent the wheel going down the wrong road, I've already done it so you don't have to do it yourself. Learn how to do the low-carbohydrate diet the right way: Atkins's way has serious flaws. © 2008 Dr. Gregory Ellis. All Rights Reserved.
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