However they will continue to sell, Advantage, Endulge, Morning Start, Quick Cuisine, Atkins supplements and their Shakes.

Dr. Atkins was still alive when the frankenfoods came on the market. It is about $$$. You pay for convenience. He knew that. I don't think he intended for the products to stall people and were he alive, he'd probably have already denounced malitol. He was a big part of getting those products manufactured and selling and he pushed them. It's not like the company went behind his back. But it's not a bad thing... It's a work in progress just like his eating plan. It's changed and evolved and will continue to do so as we learn.

Truthfully, I've been waiting for this to happen. I am so sick of people scarfing lc frankenfoods all day long then whining that lc doesn't work. Good riddance!!

I have a feeling that the true success of lcing will become more and more apparent and unarguable as the lc products go away and people get back to eating real food.

I agree with dina and groovejock. This WOE was NOT about shakes, bars, supplements, etc. That was all that shifty marketing. Money grubbers
Hopefully the nutritional benefits to this WOE will presevere and people will continue to try eating LC. This all should be a good thing...

Has anyone done a survey of people on Atkins who actually use Atkin products? I know 5 people personally who are doing Atkins and none of us eat the Atkins stuff! WE stall on it!

I heard it on NPR this morning. The story called the Atkins diet a "high-protein diet," which is pretty misleading. It also seems to me that low-carb is not really about Atkins and certainly not about Atkins Nutritionals, which is only one of many suppliers to the low-carb market. Atkins is in financial trouble because it was not ready, I would assume, for new market conditions, which include a *lot* of competition. Perhaps the overall market is shrinking, perhaps not. I haven't seen any good studies either way, my guess is that slowly a reliable market is building as people experience successful low-carb diet as an ongoing nutritional approach.

Low-carb as a craze and as a crash diet was bound to end. But the core of the Atkins approach is not about to go away, until and unless something really striking and clear comes out of yet-to-be-done nutritional research.

Is a high-fat, low-carb diet, with all the good stuff (fiber, natural foods as distinct from heaps of synthesized and highly processed substances) really safe? Anecdotally, it seems it may be. But really? Nobody knows for sure, though we might make educated guesses this way or that, I'll point out that the whole low-fat thing was nothing more than a somewhat educated guess. What we really need is a social organizational system (I first wrote "political system," but the problem is more general than that) that can allow us to organize and coordinate public funding for real nutritional research. Otherwise we depend on the drug companies, which are not about to "discover" that you can deal with your cholesterol problem by eating this or that common food, and the researchers who *do* focus on nutrition are left to scramble for scarce funding. Even though we spend trillions of dollars on food.

Billions of dollars for grain subsidies, but precious little to find out if grain is really good for you, and, if it is, under what conditions.

http://beyondpolitics.org/wiki

just watch all the kooks come out of the closet and try to tell us all that they told us the diet was no good

Well.......... not exactly.

According to AOL news, it said, and I quote:

"The low-carb craze peaked in early 2004, when over 9 percent of U.S. adults claimed to be on such a diet, according to market research firm NPD Group. That figure declined to 2.2 percent last month."

According to their poll, Low Carb dieters have decreased dramatically. Have they gone on to other methods? This would be interesting to learn.

Hmmmm, wonder what will happen to Dreamfield's.

Sad. This will be used to symbolically represent that low carb is dead, and that it was a stupid fad that meant nothing. All the positive things Atkins meant for people like you and me will be not mentioned. The completely revolutionary way Atkins turned nutrition science on its head (the effects of which have been and still are a positive benefit on the mainstream today)... that will be forgotten. What WILL be remembered are all the silly people who didn't get it, fad dieters who didn't really want to make a change and educate themselves. My sister is a waitress, she actually had a guy come in and order ribs & lc caulitaters. The ribs are not Atkins friendly, they have sauce on them (but will not put it on, on request). The guy he was eating with (also on Atkins) said to him "uh... you can't have those ribs with the sauce on Atkins". The other guy didn't care, he thought that somehow by eating more fat (from caulitaters) it somehow negated the tremendous amount of sugar on the meat. A lot of people just don't get it.

Anyway, it's really not all that surprising. Sad (because of what this will be used to represent) but not surprising. They underestimated the craze, they overestimated the number of faithful LC dieters. They were hemorrhaging Atkins bars like crazy, boxes and boxes of discounted expired bars can be purchased on ebay, swap meets, and various health websites. There just wasn't that great of a demand for replica brownies and cookies from the true LCers. It's nice once in awhile, but it's hardly a dietary mainstay you know? I bought a box of sugar free/trans fat free oreos. Even giving half the box to family members, it still took like 2 months to finish it off. In fact I through the last couple out because they went stale.

Atkins, followed correctly, is a very healthy way to eat for life if one progresses through the program.

I don't follow Atkins formally but the way I eat most of the time does resemble the way someone maintaining in Atkins would eat.
For dinner I had a serving of chicken (a serving, meaning 3 oz total meat & skin) with a gigantic caesar salad (with light caesar and not much parm cheese). I also had a nice size serving of string beans and mushrooms with just a touch of butter, and for a sweet treat afterward a 2 oz portion of cantaloupe.

Hardly gorging on fats and avoiding veggies and fruits.
Compare this to your average low fat & high carb diet: for dinner she's having a tiny piece lean chicken breast (dissected of any healthful chicken fat) with a ton of raw sugar in the form of vitamin-fortified rice & pasta as an accoutrement. The sauce and rice is probably drowned in some low fat-low cal sugar solution and a couple herbs to make it palatable. There may be a few token veggies tossed in the rice/noodles (most likely something carby like corn or beans).

Or compare to the way the average person eats: Frozen box of "food" in the microwave.


That's really the only products that I use. I love Atkins bars, I think of all the protein bars out there Atkins brand usually tastes the best, with rare exception. They are convenient and nutritious and extremely satisfying for me. I like the shakes too, but they aren't food-y enough for me to actually purchase. I liked the cereals too but unfortunately they are so expensive now, and I can't ever find them on sale, so I just don't buy them... not when I can get, say, LC special K half price from time to time and stock up when my store has a sale.

Sauces, ketchups... those things are nice to have LC, but I found cheaper and better tasting brands from other makers.

I think another reason Atkins ran into the trouble it did was because their products were overpriced and often inferior in quality compared to other makers. Why buy Atkins ketchup in a tiny bottle for a couple bucks that tastes weird, when I can get ketchup from my local store, sugar free, for 1.49 - a big bottle that tastes just like the ketchup I grew up with?

Subway still carries the low carb foods, they just don't associate with the Atkins name any longer. This implies to me that the Atkins craze may be over, but being carb conscious and eating low carb diets not so much.

I think the really good low carb products will weather the crash. Foods that are convenient and nutritious, like bars and take out meals, they'll always be around because there is a demand.

There will also always be a demand for sugar free products. The word "low carb" or "Atkins" might not be cool but the principles behind it are still very much alive.

Unfortunately even with all the "Atkins fad casualties" out there factored in... the boon of publicity for low carb eating mastheaded by this name meant a lot more people were going to try it. That means, though proportionally more people weren't succeeding after it's success, more people WERE successful by an absolute value simply because so many more people were trying it out.

I guess what I'm saying is, if I didn't hear about LC from my cousin, and my sister, and the TV showing a man losing weight describing how he lost weight eating real food while his nagging hunger was finally cured... and everyone else who didn't/might not stick with it, I would be fat today. There's no way I would have tried it and have had access to the knowledge necessary for me to learn how to correct my weight problem. that to me is sad. They are trying very hard to crush LC, and this - Atkins, the symbol of LC - is the "proof" that they were right.

Of course reality isn't like that. LC helped a lot of people and there are a lot of people out there who physically can NOT do well eating low fat and high carb... but it doesn't matter. It's all money and politics.

True, definitely...

Symbolically they (THEY = industries) are touting the "death of Atkins" to basically mean... "see, didn't we tell you? YOU WERE WRONG it was a FAD and a stupid one at that, neener neener... back to starving on bread and rice cakes or spiraling upward in weight, the lot of you! Fat is bad FAT IS BAD!"



It's also sad because now that the craze is over, lots of people will probably never get the opportunity to try it out and at least get that glimmer of hope that they have control over their bodies & weight. That glimmer, knowing that (physiologically at least) carbohydrate was the key keeper to my prison of fat, it changed my life. Follow Atkins, follow SB, follow whatever, follow nothing, have emotional reasons behind weight or not, junk food eater or former low fat purist... it doesn't matter. Odds are if you're really fat and really hungry despite eating a lot, you have an insulin problem and need to cut carbs out somehow. If I didn't figure that out by a chance diet with Atkins, I wouldn't have been able to lose weight. I don't follow Atkins today, but the only reason I can stay thin like this is because I KNOW what carbs do, that it's really all about blood sugar & insulin control. I don't need ap lan anymore, I don't need to use all these external rules and regulations EXCLUSIVELY because of this knowledge, knowledge that allows me to control my weight.

Many others will be denied this, because of the media-run by industry - will be equating AN bankruptcy with LC being a silly fad that is now dead.

Low carb diets have been around since at least the 1860's -- of course Atkins isn't dead. I am waiting for the long term studies that they started during the heart of the LC "craze." Honest doctors have been saying things like "the diet works in the short term but no one knows the long term effect." If the long term effects are favorable (I am almost 100% sure they will be) then the last hurtle for honest doctors will be gone (there of course will still be flat earth doctors who won't accept the results.) Also I might point out that if you ignore the LC craze years then I think you will find that Atkins is more popular than ever. How many people started during these last couple of years -- people who read the books and are on the diet when they might not have been if the "craze" thing hadn't happened.

Why not? Lots of people tried low carb before Atkins Nutritionals and lots of people will likely try some form of low carb in the future.
When I first started low carbing I tried a lot of products, most of them only slightly better tasting than sawdust. Even now there are only a few that I use on anything close to a regular basis (hint...none of them are made by AN ).