I recently saw a blurb in an issue of Women's Health that said Atkins was not healthy. The blurb was all of 5 sentences long and on the page that typically discusses different diets and types of weight loss. The little blurb went on to say that a person should consume around 20g of carbs when trying to lose weight. It implied that this was a healthy level. Say what? 20g of carbs is Induction level...but the first sentence of the blurb was that Atkins was bad. Total misinformation. I was really disappointed in Women's Health for printing such wrong info. It made me wonder how many other articles in that magazine were wrong and more importantly, it made me realize why people now look down on Atkins. ::shakes head::

I would write them a letter. I've never read Women's Health, but I'm wondering if there is a letter to the editor section you can get a web address or snail mail address from and send your thoughts.

I get a lot of crap about being on atkin's, people always say "not eating anything but meat is unhealthy." Then I have to go into a long talk about how atkin's isn't "just" meat. People make me angry when they talk about something they have no idea about. I can't believe a magazine would contradict itself so terribly.

write to them. they need to smack their fact checkers.

I dont even mention "atkins" anymore. I just say "whole foods."

I agree though, shame on them. Somebody didnt bother to research (fathom that).

I don't even read magazines any more. They're little more than expensive advertising brochures these days. The writers are beholden to whoever's buying ad space.

The only magazines I buy are PennyPress puzzle books!

My stepmom loves to tell visiting dinner guests that I dont like vegetables or fruit. That drives me nuts because I've always liked fruit, and since being on atkins, I eat more vegetables than I ever have in my whole life. I definately eat veggies with at least one meal every day, and usually both lunch and dinner has veggies.

Ugh.

Writing a letter to the editor is a good idea. If they get enough letters voicing the same opinion, they will pick out a good one and print it.

That is sad since "Women's Health" is one of the better rags on the market. "Energy" was the best, but it went under years ago.

By all means, write to the editor but don't expect any kind of response. They all push a "clean" bodybuilder type diet (high protein, moderate carb, low fat, tons of supplements) so high fat atkins will always be the red-headed stepchild of the fitness world.

Ouch.

I quit reading magazines myself. Almost all of them promote a low cal/ low fat diet. I have tried that more times than I can count. I have never lost much doing that, and it was pure torture. But I have lost 10 pounds this time, and 25 pounds the last time I tried LC.

Whenever I tell someone I'm LCing, they usually go on some tirade about how unhealthy it is not to eat veggies. I eat more veggies now than ever. People don't understand stuff. They read things like what's on the cover of "Women's Health" and think that a LC diet means NO CARBS AT ALL. I know some people are doing NO carb diets. I don't know how well that's working for some of you, but I can see how people would think that's less healthy than a diet that is balanced with veggies, meat and dairy.

That's priceless! But hey, at least low carb has made an impact even if people haven't quite caught on.


They all recycle the same info anyway, it's rare they'll contain something new. Then when something new does appear it's in every mag, the evening news, and the newspaper. But maybe that sort of eating style works for the majority of people, I don't really know.

uh, as a magazine editor... ouch (again).

http://www.womenshealthmag.com/arti...1-149-1,00.html

This link provides you w/ the "contact us" information for the magazine.

I was reading some magazine while waiting in a nail salon recently, called HEALTH I believe it was. Maybe that was women's health? It did seem geared to women. I don't generally read magazines, though I used to be a real magazine freak... one day I just realized what a collossal waste of time it was, like the food equivalent of oreos -- fun, yummy for the moment, but generally an empty waste of brain-calories with little no redeeming informational nutrition.

Anyway the HEALTH magazines, I read three, also seemed like little more than a glossy advertising consortium. Everything it said was generalized and oversimplified -- and that part I semi-understand, the average reading level that has to be written for does require some degree of that, but not the degree they used -- with no reference to sources or facts, yet everything written as if it had the no-brainer backing of god of course. All its healthy recipes were a nightmare, mostly replacing healthy fats with lowfat crap as if that would make a carby sugary dessert healthy, and to read the thing, you'd seriously think that the wheat, sugar, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries were simply getting together to put out propaganda -- which given the ads, I guess was exactly what it was. I lost count of the number of things I ran across that were blatantly wrong, biased, and just typical USDA/ADA "pablum" prechewed spoonfed BS in a pretty package. The irony that it said "health" on the cover didn't escape me.

In retrospect I think I should have spent the hour or so inspecting my cuticles and it would have been a more constructive use of my time.

It's really too bad, since I've nearly always had the discretionary income to do magazine subscriptions and I love the glossy escapism of them. I haven't had any for awhile, but that's in part because the subscription process really seemed to seriously lose traction when the internet came around. It always seemed like from the time I ordered until the time I got my first magazine took so long I'd forgotten I subscribed, and then the subscription ending notices always seemed to come after only a few magazines, and I was so often left feeling as if somehow I was probably missing half the subscription issues promised, that I finally gave up and figured if there was something I needed to know I could probably find it online.

I did really like this one, something like... paint and something, it was a home decorator DIY type magazine that often had these great articles where for example, they'd take a chair or a wall and have half a dozen different people design it affordably and come out with radically different looks with pretty minimal money for paints, fabric or other materials. But the subscription weirdness finally got me and I gave it up. It is often so unclear to begin with how many magazines are going to come in a given subscription, let alone when. You'd think with the internet starting to seriously compete with paper magazines, that they'd get their act together on stuff like that.

Actually, this reminds me -- a TOTAL offtopic, just indirectly related -- back in 1995 I was talking with some editor at Rolling Stone about why the hell didn't record companies make all their archives available, by album and by song, online? They could sell SO much stuff for like a dollar a song or $7 an album, stuff they were making basically ZERO money on otherwise. I could have easily gone onto the net, looked at top 100 songs from 1971 to the present, and spent hundreds on favorite songs, when I wouldn't spend $20 on a CD of the present era unless I was already a huge fan of that specific artist. It took the record companies over a decade, and they are still not remotely with the program, to get it together on this, and meanwhile of course they've spent millions freaking out in lawsuits about people sharing music -- often the same stuff that they could have been selling had they only bothered to make it available to people.

Anyway along the same lines, particularly with DIY magazines that are not dated by fashion, if there were discount packages for like a year collection of backissues, that were a lot less than cover price and maybe even on cheaper paper for all I care (or even bulk packaged in one giant catalog), I bet I would buy some of those. Or a "best of" kind of collection, maybe best of a certain room, that could even be made into like a coffee table kind of book with no real extra writing/photography even necessary. In the edu publishing industry I work in, re-use of media materials in multiple publications is a really key thing.

Back to HEALTH magazines.... it is probably a given that when the medical, pharmaceutical, and most of the food industries are dedicated to a given party line, few of the magazines are going to be very different.

At the moment, even most the bodybuilding magazines make real bodybuilders laugh. There are various websites that do reviews and summaries of the major articles in all the major BB mags so their visitors don't have to go spend money on them, as they are considered a fluffy waste of time that is little more than sponsored supplements. So really it's all the same in the magazine world, whether it's high-carb or creatine... the reality is that advertising owns any magazine, to the degree that in the modern world, it becomes pretty much a given that the party line of the corporate sponsors is going to be the primary message. Unless you live in the reality that the corporate sponsors try to support, you're probably not going to be real fond of the end result.

PS My favorite line was one that said something like, "Until now, there have been two ways to deal with acid reflux, or GERD: surgery, or medication." Then it went on to describe a NEW medicine under research.

.... funny. 10 days of lowcarb off gluten/grains did it for me. I bet that doesn't sell much though.

PJ