Thin memories

Author of controversial diet has Dayton roots, but his heart's in NYC

By D.L. Stewart
e-mail address: DL_Stewart~coxohio.com
Dayton Daily News

For five cents, readers of the Dayton Herald on April 8, 1947, got an eyeful of good news about the Dayton school system. In the annual statewide general scholarship test for high school seniors, Dayton schools “took the lion’s share of top winnings.”

More than 8,500 seniors from 1,300 Ohio high schools took the test, the lead story on the front page reported, and Wilbur Wright, Fairmont and Oakwood all finished in the top 25. But it was the Fairview Bulldogs who led the way; five of the school’s seniors were among the top 25 boys in the state.

Among them was Robert C. Atkins, of 1929 Elsmere Ave., who finished second in the state.

“He plans to study medicine at Ohio State University,” noted the story, which was accompanied by a photo of the slender 16-year-old senior wearing a sport coat and, inexplicably, holding a basketball.

Nearly 56 years later, Atkins still remembers his score: 269 points out of a possible 300. But he isn’t quite sure about the basketball.

“I guess it’s because basketball was my favorite sport,” he muses. “But I was too small to play it. I had skipped a grade, so I was a year and a half younger than everyone else. And, when I graduated, I only weighed 135 pounds.”

Atkins never went to Ohio State, opting, instead, for the University of Michigan. And he never played basketball. But weight has remained an important issue for the man who created The Atkins Diet.

To his disciples, Dr. Robert Atkins is the flavor savior who put meat and cheese back on their plates. To much of the medical establishment, he is a health-harming heretic who is clogging the arteries of America with animal fat. The argument has raged around the kid with the basketball in his hands for more than 30 years.

A biographer would say Atkins got his start in Columbus, which is where he was born. Most of his life, though, has been spent in New York City and he refers to himself as a New Yorker.

“The first time I came to New York I realized I didn’t like small towns as much as I like gigantic towns,” he says during a recent phone interview that followed his cheese omelette breakfast. His office is in midtown Manhattan, where he is “busier than I’ve ever been.” He lives on the 20th floor of a building overlooking the East River with his octo-lingual, Russian-born wife Veronica, whom he married when he was 57.

But Atkins is, undeniably, a product of the Dayton school system.

He was in seventh grade when his family moved to Dayton, where his mother settled in as a housewife, and his father “owned a few little restaurants and places where people could stay overnight.”

‘Partial to Dayton’
“I’m partial to Dayton, because I was more mature when I lived there than when I lived in Columbus,” he notes. “Most of what I learned before college I learned in Dayton.”

Whatever he may have learned here, his recollections of the small town in which he spent the majority of his teenagehood seem more perfunctory than warm. He is no Roger Clemens, the major league baseball star who sniped that the best thing about Dayton was seeing it in the rearview mirror.

But the memories Atkins cites evoke little enthusiasm. He recalls no favorite restaurants or stores, no best buddies or unrequited loves, no malt shoppes where the gang hung out after school. He doesn’t mention the name of his junior high or the names of any teachers.

After 56 years, the memory gaps certainly can be understood. Or, if he remembers these things, it could be that he chooses not to mention them. Perhaps the closest he comes to a memory that is up close and personal is an observation about his classmates that “they only really enjoyed people who were athletes rather than brains.”

“I guess I remember Fairview High School,” he concedes when pressed. “It’s still my best memory. In those days there’s no question that the people in my high school were extremely bright. And I remember during the war I had a job selling shoes in a shoe store on the weekends. I was 14 years old and here I was selling shoes to grown-ups.”

He remembers, too, appearing on a local (WHIO) radio show with some of the other kids from school when he was 16 and had thoughts of becoming a comedian.

Those thoughts lingered until after he graduated from Michigan and spent a summer as a waiter and entertainer at hotels in the Adirondacks. But then he headed off to Cornell University Medical School, and comedy gave way to cardiology, with a residency at St. Luke's Hospital in New York, a suite of offices on Park Avenue and occasional mentions in his hometown newspapers. In 1962 he earned a small headline in the Dayton Journal Herald for assisting in a transatlantic electrocardiogram for actor Edward G. Robinson.

Gains 90 pounds
As Atkins’ practice grew, so did he, until the 135-pound high school graduate eventually weighed 225. He tried traditional low-fat diets, which left him hungrier, but no thinner.

“It’s beyond my comprehension how anyone can put up with the kind of hunger I put up with,” he said in a 1973 interview in The Journal Herald.

So he turned the food pyramid upside down, developing a diet based on a study he read in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1963.

“It said there was an alternative to a low-calorie diet, which is a low-carbohydrate diet. So I went on it about a month after it printed, and I felt so much better as a result,” recalled Atkins. “One important thing is that I needed three hours less sleep a night. I still wake up after 5 1/2 or 6 hours of sleep.” He lost 27 pounds in six weeks, he said.

But the medical world gained a debate that has lasted for more than 30 years.

Long before Taco Bell used the slogan, Atkins began urging his patients to think outside the bun. The danger wasn’t in the high-fat, double-deck, cheese-covered contents available at the fast-food places popping up on every street corner, he insisted. It was in the carbohydrate-loaded, white-flour bread that surrounded them.

‘Revolution’ begins
In 1970 his “eat all you want” advice became known as the Vogue diet when it was published in that magazine. The article generated, he says, 1 million requests for copies of the plan he had conceived. And it gave birth in 1972 to Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution, reputedly one of the top 50 best-selling books of all time.

One major boost for the book came from comedian Buddy Hackett, who drew attention to it with shtick on The Tonight Show.

“He said some funny things on the show,” Atkins relates, lapsing into a passable imitation of the pudgy comedian answering a question from Johnny Carson:

“You know how I lost this weight? Dr. Atkins used to call me every hour and say, ‘Are you eating?’ ”

The medical establishment was not amused. The American Medical Association termed his work “unscientific and potentially dangerous.”

Atkins countered that the criticism was “politically motivated” and that the AMA would change its views toward him when there were new individuals in office.

“The AMA faces its largest credibility gap in history,” he declared. “The true scientific community doesn’t believe them.”

In 1972, Atkins returned to Dayton for an appearance on the Phil Donahue Show. He took the occasion to declare that “calories are just a colossal hoax perpetrated on the victimized public,” “sugar is poison” and “low-cal diets, portion control and balanced diets are not the answer.” He also bashed Weight Watchers, the Stillman water diet and fruit.

A year later, an AMA spokesman testified before a Senate committee headed by George McGovern that the diet was “risky and very dangerous.” Atkins countered that the AMA “should be cooperating on the development of fresh approaches for combating obesity instead of quarreling over every new suggestion that departs from the traditionally standard but unsuccessful recommendations of the medical establishment.” The same year a lawsuit was filed in Cleveland demanding that the sale of the book be banned in Ohio.

Diet rivals clash
In 1981, diet plan rival Nathan Pritikin declared that Atkins’ diet could cause everything from heart problems to bad breath. Atkins’ reply was a summons connected to a $5 million libel and slander suit.

The weighty war of words eventually settled into a publicity truce. But, last year, the cease fire ended.

In April, Atkins’ critics appeared to have fresh ammunition for their artery-clogging claims when it was reported that he had suffered a heart attack at his Manhattan home during breakfast. A statement quickly appeared on his company’s Web site insisting, “This was not a heart attack but a cardiac arrest related to an infection of the heart he has been suffering from for a few years.”

Later that year Atkins fired back with an assault of his own: a Duke University diet and fitness center study by Dr. Eric Westman that seemed to endorse his diet. The mainstream press began to speculate that maybe Atkins had been right all along.

But mainstream medicine is still not about to wave a white flag. The study was publicly dissed by quotable health professionals as “such a scam” and “something that makes money for Dr. Atkins and not much more than that.”

“Hepatitis C is effective at helping people lose weight, too,” another scoffed.

Even those willing to admit that the low-fat diet might be wrong were not willing to admit that the high-fat diet is right.

“The low-fat, high-carb diet that’s been trendy for 15 years is the pendulum swinging too far in one direction,” says Dr. Stanley Rockson, chief of consultative cardiology at Stanford University. “Atkins is too far a swing in the other direction.”

Still at odds with AMA
And there is little doubt, as Atkins concedes, that any possibility of dietary peace talks in our time has been tabled by the recent publication of his latest book, Atkins for Life (St. Martin’s Press, $24.95), currently at No. 2 on the bestseller list at Books & Co. in Kettering.

“I would say we’re still not the best of friends,” he declares of his three-decade spat with the AMA. “Obviously I was overconfident about how long it would take them to change their views.”

The continuing disagreements, he says, are more than honest people with an honest difference of opinion. They are caused by “people who don’t want to admit they are wrong. It’s very hard to say ‘I know I told everybody to go on a low-fat diet, and I was wrong.’ ”

In Atkins’s eyes, there is no question who is wrong.

“After hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing to support the low-fat approach and years of information dissemination, including the Food Guide Pyramid, it is clear that low-fat programs have not proved to help most Americans enjoy an optimal weight and improved health,” he writes in the new book’s introduction.

“It really comes down to this: How would you prefer to spend the rest of your life:

A. Munching celery sticks, weighing your portions and never feeling really satisfied with your food?

B. Eating a wide variety of delicious foods in satisfying amounts — and enjoying every bite?”

Atkins clearly is not a celery stick muncher. He is 6 feet tall and lists his weight at 189 pounds, down from that high of 225. At the age of 72, he still seems to have a hearty appetite for delicious foods and a good scrap between meals. If he has trouble recalling names and places of his years in Dayton, he has no trouble at all reciting statistics that support his theories.

“There were 3,000 deaths from heart disease in 1930,” he declares. “By 1970 they went up to a million. Between 1960 and 1980 there was not a 1 percent increase in the percentage of people who had obesity. Then it doubled or tripled. The percentage of fat (consumed) dropped from 40 percent to 32 percent, but at the same time there was a 30-pound a year increase in the intake of sugar and a 64-pound increase in flour.”

All these statistics, he insists, are proof that his method is preferable to the scores of other diet plans that come and go with confusing regularity and yo-yo results. And, as he talks about metabolic pathways, the changes in the nature of carbohydrates and the evils of sugar and flour, his voice grows stronger and more impassioned. Skeptics may claim that it is all about money or ego. Atkins insists it is all about health.

“I’m trying to put an end to the epidemic proportions of obesity and diabetes,” he declares.

Although he says “quite a few” of the patients he sees in his New York office are from the Miami Valley, Atkins has no immediate plans for a house call to check up on the health of Dayton.

“It’s been a good 10 years or more since I’ve been in Dayton,” he says. “The last time I just drove around to see how much has changed. When I went there, Fairview was at the northwest end of the city and there was hardly anything beyond it.

“If I ever do come back, I would probably just look for the people I had as friends when I went to school. Hopefully, they might have a party for me.”

Or, at the very least, a steak fry.

Contact D.L. Stewart at 225-2439 or by e-mail at DL_Stewart~coxohio.com.

[From the Dayton Daily News: 02.20.2003]

http://www.activedayton.com/ddn/lif...0220atkins.html