Dr. Atkins made a really weird claim on Larry King Live, which I saw repeated during his wife's interview last night. He claimed their were no heart attacks before 1912. That just seemed like the oddest thing to say. Then he went on to say it was the first cadiologist setup shop.

Anyone have any insight into this claim?

I'm pretty skeptical. I don't believe everything Dr. Atkins says is correct. I don't think anyone has all the answers or ever will. But this one struck me as really far way out there.

http://sln.fi.edu/biosci/history/history.html

This page offers a bit of insight... I couldn't really find anything else. I think Dr Atkins was on the right track about this issue. I believe it was in Protein Power that I read that the inventor of the EKG machine was told that it was a waste of his efforts! Today, that probably would have gotten him a Nobel prize for medicine.

Where I think the above article is wrong is in the assertion that our diets became "more rich" as the 20th century progressed. I disagree - we consumed a lot more eggs, lard and other fatty foods before heart disease increased. Fat consumption continued to dwindle. At the same time, sugar and hydrogenated fat consumption increased dramatically.

(edit: ) There's better info here, from the Weston Price page:

http://www.westonaprice.org/moderndiseases/hd.html

What isn't addressed (at least in my quick glance-over) is that:

We quit dying of disease

Women quit dying in childbirth

Young men lived through their war injuries that killed them in earlier years

We did more autopsies and started caring about why people died.

You have to get to a certain age to die of heart disease.

Well I can't help but feel this statement is just wrong. People drop dead of heart attacks for all kinds of reasons, not just blocked arteries. Now cardiology as a specialty didn't really get underway until about that time... maybe what that really means is it wasn't identified as a cause of death until then.

And I don't really pin it on eating more/less of any particular food either. For instance, I know my 84 year old mother and her mother ate bread, rice, potatoes and so on. So did her mother (born in the late 1800's). Being farmers they had probably been eating that way a long time. They also had lots of saturated fat. They had cream on their cereal for instance. They made cakes for special occassions.

But they probably had far less sugar than we do. I'll have to ask mom about what kind of flour they used. When I was growing up she always insisted on using whole wheat flour, but I think they probably used white flour back on the farm.

Anyone ever see 'Frontier House'? It was an authentic reinactment of frontier life in Montana, mid-1800's. I'm not positive, but I think those women were using white flour. You'd buy it in 50 lb sacks from the general store.

The difference is, those people worked like dogs. And baking sweet treats was incredibly labor intensive. Imagine trying to whip eggs or cream using a whisk... my arm hurts just imagining it. Even wealthy people had to walk to get places.

I suspect that the real problem with carbs is more of a lifestyle thing. If you're a farmer out manually plowing your fields behind a horse, carbs aren't going to be a problem for you. If you're a housewife churning butter, hand washing all your laundry, same thing... but for us modern folks we can't handle it.

I do agree that this is very true. During the Saturday show Dr. Atkins was asked why marathoners don't have any problems with a 60% carb diet, and he explained that of course these are top athletes who have no problem burning the carbs.

However, Dr. Atkin's statement about heart attacks and 1912 is absolutely correct. Prior to that, doctors didn't have the best access to surgery, or drugs, but what they did do like the dickens was DIAGNOSE. In fact, right before the turn of the century was a real revolution in the systematic diagnosis of conditions using simple tools and informed observation, since blood tests, etc, were still in their infancy.

And there were diagnoses of heart murmurs, chamber deformities, the ravages of scarlet fever, valve troubles, on and on...but what they didn't find was today's all too common "heart disease." Clogged and stiff arteries that led to heart attacks were so rare as to be not even lumped in as a common diagnosis.

The rich were known to have "diseases of ease" but even they were more likely to suffer from gout than heart attacks.

Carbs, even refined carbs, are not any problem for the body if you BURN THEM UP. Heck, I've seen Ironman competitors chug down pure sugar shots. And they do burn them up.

But what chance does an ordinary person have to burn up a 60% carb diet, most of which is refined?

Very little.

I think you all are exactly right. On a related matter, I saw a piece about obesity (or the lack of it) among the Amish in Pennsylvania, where I live. They eat tremendous amounts, of carbs and fats as well as protein, but obesity is extremely rare, because they work at manual labor like farming without any aid from motor or electrically powered devices. (Amish recipes typically contain broad noodles, cream sauces, sweet relishes, lots of corn and potatoes, etc.)

And it's known that this isn't just a genetic tendency, because once the Amish move off the farms into more built-up areas and adopt carpentry and other more sedentary professions as a way of life, they become as susceptible to obesity as any other group.

,

I hadn't heard Dr A say this, but have heard a similar idea expressed by the famous cardiologist Dr Paul Dudley White, (Pres. Eisenhower's Dr) who said that when he bagan practice in 1921 coronaries were "rare" and "almost never seen." Seems to be true that brutally hard work will enable you to survive a diet which is unhealthy according to lowfat folks, and also to lowcarb - although it is increasingly said that, once the chinese quit slaving in the fields and riding their bikes for miles, that their mega-carb rice diet is no better for them than it would be for us. So I guess, if we want to have shoo-fly pie and such things along with our fat meat, we'd better be out there tossing 100 lb hay bales up onto a truck all day.

Another thing that occurs to me is that the carb-pushers say that exercise will cure the glucose excesses. But really, is doing a half an hour of exercise a day really sufficient?

The carb pushers would have you eating 4-6 meals everyday full of carbs, you're only really going to be burning that from the blood stream for a short, short period of the day, when you exercise.

Maybe this is another difference. People used to be physically active all day long, now it is in very short bursts just once a day really.

Perhaps this is why even people who are working out everyday religously still aren't doing well on high-carb diets.

The cure to obesity is easy! Everyone's gotta go back to farming and throw out all modern conviences.

Either that or we have to change our bodies somehow...

Or make radical changes to our diets.

Throw out the refined white sugar... I have the old book, and Dr. Atkins said because of the introduction of refined white sugar into our diets, and the enormous amounts the average people consume every year, heart disease has become much more prevelant than it was before 1912. Before that time it was almost non existant. Pretty interesting.

I once read that a hundred and fifty or two hundred year ago, when most people were farmers, the average person consumed 600 more calories per day than the average person today. So, what they ate was not so important, because they were active enough to burn off everything that they did eat. Today, most of us spend the majority of our day sitting on our butts.

I'm sorry, in the previous post I meant "burned 600 more calories per day", not consumed.

Sugar has been around a lot longer than 1912 and it wasn't rare nor particularly expensive. I have a 19th century Trifle recipe that calls for lots of sugar. My mom says it is refined out of beets sometimes. Maybe that was just during the war though.

What is different is that we get a lot more sugar these days. One thing I think a lot of people don't think about is in juices and fruity drinks. They've been told that drinking juice is as healthy as eating the fruit. So parents are giving their kids incredible amount of the stuff.

Then the sources of sugar are so much easier to get these days, candy, baked things.. you don't get them on your rare trips to town, you get them on your daily trip to the store. Everywhere you turn there is sugar easily accessible. In the past, you'd get a bit with baked goods, maybe canned fruits, in infrequent desserts.

I think what he meant to say was heart disease didn't start to become a wide spread social health concern until about 1912.

SODA ...when was that introduced? There was no diet soda when I was a kid... and we had soda quite frequently... We used to walk to town everyday after school and go for a coke and fries... Then on Saturdays my dad would always bring home a case of soda. On SUndays we would go to the corner soda fountain for "Cherry Cokes" ......Hmm, I never realized how much of the stuff we inhaled...Today I never drink soda. Guess I had enough!

Soda was before the turn of the century with soda parlors, Coke (with real cocaine!) "Coca-cola was invented by a Dr. John Stith Pemberton in 1886."

It got a big push from the temperance movements of the day, as a drink that was not TOO intoxicating (they were suspicious enough of the stuff that you couldn't sell it on Sundays, thus was born the ice cream sundae.)

However, I think it took late twentieth century marketing with kid's TV programs to turn soda into the "drink it like water, drink it instead of water, BIG GULP it" commodity it is today.