Dueling diets: A game of good carb-bad carb

Believe it or not, the Atkins and Ornish approaches to weight loss agree on some things.

Hartford Courant

BY GARRET CONDON Posted on Tue, Jun. 03, 2003

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Whatever the medical journals say (the latest seemed to give the weight-loss edge to low-carbohydrate regimes), dieters in the Atkins faction will gobble their bacon and eggs, while Dean Ornish devotees steam their lentils.

Add in "The Zone," "Sugar Busters," the Mediterranean diet and others, and you have a recipe for national dietary discord.

Can't we all just get along while we diet?

Actually, many of these diets do agree on at least one thing: Americans are overloading on concentrated sugars and refined starches.

From the sugar in soft drinks to super-sized processed-flour foods like white bread and bagels, this food category is contributing to the bulging of America. And it may be that these kinds of foods contribute disproportionately to obesity.

"Nobody who has legitimate nutritional credentials is saying that starch and sugar is good for you," said David Katz, director of the Yale Prevention Research Center and author of "The Way to Eat."

The food group we call "carbohydrates" is impossibly huge, encompassing everything from garbanzo beans to Gummi Bears.

But the garbanzo beans aren't the problem.

According to federal data, from 1970 to 1994 the consumption of high-carbohydrate snacks increased by 200 percent. The use of wheat flour increased by 35 percent, corn flour by 79 percent and grain mixtures (such as pizza base) by 115 percent. That includes a lot of chips, crackers, muffins and tacos.

Readers may doubt that dueling diet gurus can agree on the dangers of overdoing these kinds of food when their dietary schemes seem to differ most on the issue of carbohydrates. On one end, there is Ornish's very-low-fat diet that is rich in carbohydrates. On the other stand the heirs of the late Robert Atkins, who believe carbohydrates are the problem.

Ornish said he encourages people to eat complex carbohydrates like beans and whole grains, not simple sugars and starches. And Colette Heimowitz, director of education and research at Atkins Health and Medical Information Service in New York, explains that if people properly follow the four phases of the Atkins diet, they will at Phase 4 begin adding back complex carbohydrates -- like whole-grain foods.

"The white flour, the white sugar -- the refined and overly processed carbohydrates -- are the only bad ones," she notes.

There are several problems with refined carbs. One is that Americans are eating too many of them and in portions that are too big.

Another is that it's easy to overindulge in these foods because of what's inside them -- or not inside them. Ornish notes that "you can consume large amounts without getting full, since the fiber and bran (that make us feel full) were removed or were not present."

And finally, it may be that the calories from concentrated sugars and refined starches are more likely to inflate the old spare tire than calories from other foods -- a possibility that is being studied and debated.

Kelly Brownell, professor of psychology at Yale University and director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, said people who want to lose weight need to figure out what nutrients they're overeating and decide what type of diet makes sense. Any diet that cuts calories can work, he said.

"There are best approaches for individuals," he said. "What might be highly effective for one person will fail utterly for their next-door neighbor."