Hello everyone, my name is Dana and I live in Belgium.
My sister just wrote me a mail that a girl died in the UK because of the Atkins diet, she was doing this diet for 2 years. Have you heard of it, is it true ? I am just a bit worried.

No its not true!! I havent heard anything of the sort and if it was I am sure it will be in all the newspapers and television. There is so much bad press about Atkins at the moment, and if we listended to it none of us would be doing thes plan!!

The only one I've heard of was the kidney failure one... urban myth from what I can tell, and was originally about a US girl.

Its a bit like that big story about the girl who "died from taking ecstasy"... of course, it later transpired she actually died from obsessively drinking about 20 litres of water a day till her brain essentially drowned... but that doesn't make quite such an interesting story, does it?

Truly you don't have anything to worry about Dana... if you look at the number of attention-grabbing headline stories compared to the number of folk who'll tell you how it - sometimes literally - saved their life being on this diet, I think the figures (and what your own body is telling you!) speak for themselves.

lol, if someone had died and they could remotely tie it to Atkins we'd be getting news flashes every half hour as the media is manically anti-Atkins at the minute!

Hi there,

The 16-year-old girl the media is obssessing over at the moment actually died in the US 3 years ago. The story has just recently been dragged up and aired all over.

There is no evidence of what exactly caused her death. It sounds to me as though she may well have been taking diet pills and/or diuretics.

There have been several threads here about this - one last year.

This post from Doreen T explains it well: http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?p=1318797

Cheers.

Rosebud

PS: The girl had allegedly been doing Atkins for only 2 weeks - not 2 years.

I thought it was that girl but wasnt sure with the post saying 2 years, it amazing the scaremoungering that goes on!!

If it had been in the UK, it would have been front page headlines in all the newspapers and lead item on the news for days!

Atkins-bashing seems to be the new craze!