"A New Look At The Atkins Diet"
The following is an excellent print article I found through the Yahoo Group Kosher-Low-Carb~yahoogroups.com. The publisher, Yated Ne'eman (Monsey, NY) does not have a website, so no link is available. The insight and understanding of the author are really amazing and a rare treat for those used to the errors of the mainstream media.
The article uses several Hebrew and Yiddish terms:
"treife" - forbidden; non-kosher; contrary to the Jewish dietary laws.
"Ta’anis" - a fast (going without food).
"Shabbos" - the Jewish Sabbath (sundown Friday until sundown Saturday).
"kashrus" - kosher; in accord with Jewish dietary laws.
- gotbeer
A New Look At The Atkins Diet
By Yaakov Kornreich
After more than 30 years of fighting his critics, especially his colleagues in the medical profession who called his dietary ideas wrong and dangerous, Dr. Robert Atkins, the father of what today is called the “low-carb” revolution, died last year on April 17, after having fallen and striking his head on an icy New York sidewalk. He passed away just one month before the vindication of his radical nutritional theories in America’s most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine. But even before then, while he was still alive, Atkins saw the beginnings of independent medical research verifying the theories for which he had been called a crackpot for so many years.
In the months since his death, the health and weight control approach that he pioneered, a diet featuring unrestricted amounts of fat and protein, but strictly limiting carbohydrate intake, has sparked an overnight revolution in the nation’s leading fast food restaurant chains and on the shelves of supermarkets.
Sparked by increasing concern over the epidemic of obesity in this country, driving up the incidence of adult onset (Type 2) diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and many other health problems, Americans seeking to control their weight are turning increasingly to the basic nutritional formula that Atkins had been promoting since he published his first book in 1972, and more recent variations on that same approach, such as the currently popular “South Beach Diet” plan.
Impressed by statistics that show Atkins’ diet approach to be at least as effective as more traditional low-fat and low caloric intake diet philosophies, overweight Americans have become carbohydrate conscious, virtually overnight, and the American food industry, eager as ever to pick up on the latest food fad, has willingly gone along.
In 2000, only 28 new food products were marketed in this country as low in carbohydrates, says the Mintel Group, a market research firm in Chicago. Last year, that number jumped to 307 new products, and many more new low- carb food products are now on the way. Suddenly, the treife McDonald’s and Burger King hamburger chains are promoting bunless burgers wrapped in lettuce. The Subway’s treife chain is even advertising Atkins diet approved fast food wraps.
MEDIA DISTORTIONS HAVE COME WITH POPULARITY
Of course, as with any counter-intuitive idea which fights for years in order gain popular acceptance, the success of the Atkins approach has come with oversimplifications that overlook the most important insights that Atkins developed.
In fact, long before the obesity epidemic struck this country full force over the past decade, Atkins had diagnosed its root cause, and its link to diabetes. While newspaper accounts of the Atkins diet have long stressed its high protein, high fat, low-carbohydrate characteristics, those who have bothered to read his book, "Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution" which sold 15 million copies and was updated by Atkins with new research three times since it first was published in 1972, know that he was really concerned primarily with how the body processes and reacts to all kinds of different foods.
The basis of Atkins’ theory is that food intolerances are behind many of our undiagnosed aches and pains, from migraine headaches to abdominal pains and asthma. The intolerances, in turn, are caused by the body’s inability to properly break down those foods into their components, and, as a result, the incompletely digested food creates an immune system reaction that causes the many symptoms which we cannot readily explain.
Atkins cited a medical study done in London in 1983 on 88 children who had complained of migraine headaches at least once a week for the previous six months or more. After putting them on a rotation diet, systematically eliminating certain foods, such as milk, eggs, wheat, chocolate and oranges, from their meals, 93% of the children were cured of their headaches, once the offending food to which they were intolerant was identified.
ATKINS SAYS INSULIN OVERPRODUCTION IS THE KEY OBESITY PROBLEM
The most important of the food intolerance which Atkins discovered was towards refined carbohydrates. By that Atkins meant things like white bread and cakes, pastas and other sugar-rich foods which tend to overstimulate the pancreas, creating a surplus of insulin in the system.
It is this chronic insulin overproduction, which, over time, becomes an automatic body reaction, which Atkins defined as the root cause of the modern American obesity problem. The surplus of insulin drives the hunger and craving for carbohydrate-rich foods. This triggers a greater intake of carbohydrates than the body can normally burn, and the excess is then converted to fat. Meanwhile the body’s allergic reaction to the carbohydrates drives a vicious circle, stimulating the pancreas to create more insulin, and the hunger for more of the wrong foods. Eventually, Atkins said, chronic insulin excess leads to Type 2 (adult onset) diabetes, which has grown in this country by leaps and bounds along with the epidemic of obesity.
When Atkins first began writing about these theories, more than thirty years ago, and preaching that the only way out of this food trap was to clamp down on the intake of carbohydrates, he was dismissed as a crackpot.
But using the scientific method of trial and error, Atkins proved experimentally that his radical ideas worked in his patients, and that, in fact, if the carbohydrates were replaced by fats and proteins in the diet, the result would be a reduction in weight, despite the fact that the fats and proteins were higher in caloric content.
EXPLORING HOW THE BODY USES FOOD
How was that possible? Again, Atkins chose to explore how the body handled the food that it took in rather than merely how many calories it contained.
Atkins understood that it was the overproduction of insulin from carbohydrate intake which caused the hunger driving most people to overeat. Another problem that Atkins discovered was the fact that the body finds it easier to burn carbohydrates than fats in order to generate energy. As a result, once it starts burning those carbohydrates, it will naturally create a desire for more, through insulin-induced hunger, driving the constant cravings that makes it so hard for the overweight to stop eating the foods they know are bad for them.
Atkins’ formula for breaking out of this insulin trap is to force the body out of the carbohydrate- burning cycle, by simply cutting off the flow of carbohydrates long enough to force the body to stop burning them, and switching over to burning something else for fuel, namely fats and proteins.
Atkins said that once the body switched over to burning fats and proteins, the insulin-driven hunger pangs would quickly disappear.
WHY IT IS BEST TO START AFTER A TA’ANIS
When I was first introduced to the Atkins diet, a decade ago, by friends who said they had lost - and kept off - their excess pounds using it, I was skeptical. Someone lent me his copy of Atkins’ book, and encouraged me to try it, noting that religious Jews have a natural opportunity to do so several times a year.
“When was that?” I asked. “Whenever you observe a Ta’anis,” my friend said. To put it simply, when you stop eating for a day during a Ta’anis, you wind up depriving yourself of carbohydrates long enough to force your body to convert to burning fat and protein instead of carbohydrates. I had actually noticed the phenomenon myself, but never understood what was behind it. Usually I fast pretty easily until the late afternoon. Then I get hungrier and hungrier.
However, before the Ta’anis ends, I usually reach a point where suddenly, I am no longer hungry, and I feel less tired. That is the point when my body switched over from trying to burn carbohydrates, which had all been consumed by that point, to burning fats, of which I had more than enough stored up.
Reaching the point of that conversion to burning fat and protein is the most difficult phase of the four-phase Atkins diet. It is called the induction phase, which, if you are not fasting, can only be reached by cutting back carbohydrate intake to 20 grams or less per day.
Once your body starts burning fat instead of carbohydrates, the diet becomes easier. The insulin-driven cravings for carbohydrates and sugary foods subsides, and you now are only eating the fuel that your body needs to burn. Since you are no longer being driven to overeat, you are free to eat as many fat or protein laden foods as you want, as long as you don’t eat enough carbohydrates to trigger your body to switch back to burning them.
MANY OTHER POSITIVE SIDE EFFECTS
Atkins predicts, and I found it to be so in my own experience, that freeing yourself of carbohydrate dependance soon has other positive effects, in addition to weight loss. These include the cure of seemingly unrelated bodily aches and pains, which, in retrospect, were probably triggered by related food intolerances.
And the weight loss itself is rapid. That is because the body is directly burning fat for energy, and if the fat in the food you are eating is not enough, it will directly burn the excess fat stored in your body.
In his diet book, however, Atkins actively promotes the need for a proper intake of other nutrients, including multivitamins as well as the consumption of large amounts of water, to avoid possible damage due to harmful byproducts from the body’s metabolism of the larger quantities of proteins and fats which his diet calls for.
Atkins was well aware of the potential problems that his diet could pose to people already suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. Atkins strongly recommended the careful monitoring of these conditions, while predicting, despite the conventional medical wisdom during most of the past 30 years, that the body on a low-carb diet would largely compensate, and such conditions would not worsen.
In the independent studies of the Atkins diet conducted over recent years, the finding that most conventional medical experts found most surprising was that this prediction by Atkins turned out to be accurate, although exactly what the body’s compensating mechanisms to keep blood pressure and similar conditions under control while on a low-carb diet are still not well understood.
Atkins continually emphasized the need for carb intake control, and even urged those following his diet to monitor their bodily functions closely for the telltale signs that their body was, indeed, burning fats and proteins for energy rather than carbohydrates.
THE THREE OTHER PHASES OF THE DIET
The second phase of Atkins’ diet formula was to gradually adjust the daily carbohydrate back up to a level where weight loss continued, at a slower, more sustainable pace. This Ongoing Weight Loss phase was meant to last for months, until the dieter neared his or her target weight, at which point the diet would be adjusted once again. The dieter would be encouraged to find an equilibrium level of carbohydrate intake, satisfying dietary cravings while maintaining the desired weight. This pre-maintenance phase would pave the way for the dieter to then create a variety of food plans with the desired level of carbohydrates, which varies from person to person, so that their weight would remain under control permanently. That is the so-called lifetime maintenance stage, the fourth and final segment of the Atkins diet.
In previous years, the third and fourth stages of the Atkins diet were the most challenging to maintain, in large part because there were so few low-carb foods, and particularly good tasting noshing snacks, available on the market. Atkins diet followers typically swapped recipes, some developed by Atkins himself, and published in his books, to substitute for the high carb staples they had grown up on. For kashrus observing Jews, the challenge was even greater, because many of the substitute foods which Atkins recommended were treife.
When I was on the diet, I found myself living on large amounts of eggs, cheese, tuna and red meats, many of which I liked, but eventually I grew tired of them. There was also the problem of cheating on the daily carb limit, especially on Shabbos. The diet allows a little bit of flexibility in this regard, permitting a one-day carb splurge followed by a couple of days of below quota carb consumption to make up for it. But the natural tendency is to cheat and not make it up, and that soon catches up to you.
THE TOUGHEST PART: STICKING WITH IT OVER THE LONG RUN
As with any weight loss program, discipline and consistency is the key to long term success with the Atkins diet. Those who “fall off” the Atkins low carb wagon can rapidly find themselves back where they started.
That was one of the main criticisms of the Atkins diet by the recent studies which confirmed both its superior efficiency as a rapid weight-loss program, as well as the diet’s ability to keep cholesterol and blood pressure at desirable levels. But in that respect, the Atkins diet is no worse or better than other weight loss regimes.
However, the recent flood of new, and in many cases, kosher certified Atkins-friendly low-carb products, makes the challenge of staying with the Atkins diet far less daunting than it was years ago.
While Atkins never varied his basic diet approach over the years, he did incorporate new medical findings into it as time went on. For example, his original diet made no distinction between various kinds of carbohydrates. All were treated the same. But in recent years, as research revealed the many beneficial effects of increased fiber in the diet, Atkins modified his diet formula, allowing carbohydrates from fiber to be exempted from the strict daily carb limit.
SLOW ACCEPTANCE BY THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT
But Atkins’ many critics in the medical establishment have been very slow to admit that they were wrong in originally condemning his approach. In light of new evidence that he was right and they were wrong, they keep insisting that more research findings are necessary to fully vindicate Atkins’ approach.
The attitude expressed by Gary Foster, clinical director of the University of Pennsylvania's Weight and Eating Disorders Program about his own study’s finding with regard to the Atkins diet is typical. "The results are very surprising and at the same time very preliminary. The take-home message is that this diet deserves further study."
The impact of Atkins on the food industry, and American eating habits, has already been substantial. The bread and grain industry has noted a sharp drop in the per capita consumption of breads, the primary sources of carbohydrates, over the past year, and it is reacting by trying to reduce the carbs in its products, while hoping that this is just another passing diet trend.
MEDIA DISTORTIONS AND MIS-REPORTING
In the meantime, the media, in trying to popularize the Atkins trend, has tended to distort its message. The first common distortion is the media’s focus on Atkins giving permission to dieters to eat as much fat and protein-rich foods, such as steaks, as they want, without understanding or explaining to the public the natural limiting factors on that consumption which Dr. Atkins discovered.
Practitioners of the Atkins approach are routinely frustrated by the media‘s tendency to focus on the sensational details of his diet while overlooking the more important underlying principles.
Atkins’ theory was not even fully explained in a long feature article appearing on January 18 in the New York Times, which focused on what it said was a cutback in the Atkins steak consumption allowance. That headline, in fact, turned out to be meaningless to anybody familiar with the diet’s principles.
Another recent modification to the Atkins regimen made by his followers and reported upon in the same NY Times story was an adjustment to the recommended mix between saturated, unsaturated and harmful transfats, which again did not impact Atkins’ basic dietary theories.
"Atkins for Life," Dr. Atkins's newest book, published shortly before his death, says: "You should always eat a balance of different types of natural fat," but does not offer a specific formula. Atkins, unlike other popular diet formulas, rarely specified a maximum allowable amount of any food type, other than carbs, and even in its latest form, the diet remains highly unconventional.
For example, the total percentage of calories from fat in the most recent revision of the Atkins diet is 60 percent, or twice the level recommended by the US Department of Agriculture nutritional standards. One-third of that can also be in the form of saturated fat - again twice the level recommended by the USDA. The rest should be poly- and mono-unsaturated fats.
That translates to the equivalent of a steak every day, much higher than traditional dietitians would recommend. That reflects Atkins’ belief that saturated fat is not much of an issue as long as carbohydrates remain low.
SOME EXPERTS STILL SAY NO, OR ADMIT THAT THEY JUST DON’T KNOW
But some in the medical community, including Dr. Frank M. Sacks, a professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at the Harvard School of Public Health, still reject Atkins’ theories, despite the recent research backing them up. Dr. Sacks still contends that saturated fats are a danger to cardiac health, but others in the field now frankly admit that they just don’t know, and want to see more research before jumping on the Atkins bandwagon.
And while Dr. Atkins is gone, he leaves behind a vibrant and active legacy, in the form of his books, his medical research, as well as a profit-making institution dedicated to promoting the approach that he pioneered and putting more low carb products on the market.
It is also true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. While the South Beach diet does not strictly adhere to the Atkins principles, it borrows enough of them to assure that the Atkins approach will no longer be ignored by dieticians and nutritional experts, even while still skeptical medical experts try to discover why the Atkins approach does, in fact, work so well, while breaking all of the conventional rules.
|
Linear Mode
