Oh, I beg your pardon. Please forgive me for that outburst. You see, it's just that after two solid years of having low-carb hype shoved into every pore of my consciousness (and subconsciousness), my head finally exploded. Now, don't get me wrong: I think that low-carb diets can be very beneficial, but their current portrayal as the panacea for America's obesity problems has led to unreasonable expectations, and I suspect, has done a disservice to the Atkinsn diet in the process. But we're putting the carbs before the horse, and we need to step back and take a look at the nuts and bolts of the low-carb diets before we can pass judgement.
Until the first half of the 20th Century, Americans ate much like they had for generations and much like people around the world: fruits, vegetables, cheap starches such as rice and beans, and animal products when they could afford them. Things began to change, though, as the United States found itself in the throes of war, including World War I, World War II, and Korea. In particular, a lot of research and development went into finding ways to keep soldiers fed on the front lines, and fresh food wasn't economically practical. Thus, new methods of refining and preserving food were developed. Coupled with the economic booms that followed the wars, these processing methods made new and tastier foods available to people in all walks of life.
Not coincidentally, the rise of processed foods has been accompanied by dramatic increases in diabetes, heart disease, and other lifestyle-related illnesses that can decimate a person's health. While one of the early suspects in this sad trend was identified as dietary fat (particularly saturated fats), decades of preaching low-fat lifestyles and the concomitant manufacture of low-fat foods, beginning roughly in the middle 1970's, saw us getting fatter an unhealthier. Curiously, at about the same time that the low-fat gurus and aerobic exercise proponents such as Dr. Kenneth Cooper were gearing up their campaigns, another camp was approaching the problem from a completely different angle. Chief among those who thought the orthodoxy were missing something was Dr. Robert Atkins, a renowned cardiologist.Atkins. Atkins had seen first-hand the ravages of heart-disease, obesity, and diabetes in his patients and noted that all (or most) had some things in common, namely high blood sugar levels and insulin insensitivity. Atkins also noted that their diets were high in refined foods, and particularly in the sugary stuff. He hypothesized that the blood sugar instability caused by such a diet and the associated action of the powerful insulin hormone were the root cause of many of the diseases he was treating. As a treatment for his patients (and as a way for HIM to lose weight), Atkins developed the first widelyused low-carb, high-fat diet, which is of course the basis for today's low-carb fad dieting.
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