THERE’S so much pressure on being thin these days. Everyone has to look good and claim to feel good.
Gone are the days when it was attractive to be on the voluptuous side. Most people would rather shudder than admit they are actually a size 14 or 16. Acceptable clothes sizes now range between sizes eight to 12, with 12 verging on the slightly heavy side mind you.
It’s not surprising we put ourselves under so much pressure to lose weight when we live on a daily diet of celebrity pictures staring at us from the front of glossy magazine covers.
We all know who Catherine Zeta Jones, Geri Halliwell, Minnie Driver, Renee Zellweger, Jennifer Aniston and even Robbie Williams are. In fact, these people are often acclaimed for their beauty and lithe figures. It should therefore come as no surprise to learn that when simple, common folk hear that these glamorous people are on the controversial Atkins diet, very soon everyone follows suit – irrespective of the various expert health warnings.
So what is the Atkins diet? Very simply put, it is a low-carbohydrate, high-protein and high-fat diet regime. In other words, you enjoy salads, fish, roast rack of lamb and lobster, butter and broccoli and even bacon and eggs for breakfast, but stay away from beans on toast, pasta, rice, pizza and French fries.
Dr Robert C. Atkins, a Cornell University’s medical school graduate, first tried a low-carbohydrate diet in 1963 after reading about one in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He said he lost weight so easily that he converted his fledgling Manhattan cardiology practice into an obesity clinic.
Atkins believed the fundamental dietary villains were carbohydrates, such as bread, pasta, rice and starchy vegetables. He argued they made susceptible people produce too much insulin, which in turn results in hunger and encourages them to eat more and put on fat. He also blamed them for fatigue, headaches, lassitude, irritability, and depression, and said his diet helped banish these ailments.
On the other hand, fat in foods quenches appetite and stops carbohydrate craving, said Atkins. It also forces the body into a state of ketosis. In other words, “in the absence of carbohydrates, the body has no choice but to burn its own fat,” he said.
Atkins first advocated his unorthodox weight-loss plan in his 1972 book, Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution. Its publication came at a time when the medical establishment was encouraging a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. The following year, the American Medical Association dismissed Atkins’ diet as nutritional folly and Congress summoned him to Capitol Hill to defend the plan.
The medical association labelled it “potentially dangerous,” and said the diet’s scientific foundation was “naοve” and “biochemically incorrect”. It even went so far as to reproach the book’s publishers for promoting “bizarre concepts of nutrition and dieting”.
Atkins’ popularity re-emerged in 1992 with the publication of his revised book, Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution. It sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and spent five years on the New York Times bestseller list
Six years on, Britain and America are once again obsessed with the Atkins diet. In fact, his diet book is currently one of Britain’s most popular reads, with the updated edition selling more than 120,000 copies a month.
“You’ve heard the expression ‘fad diet’. Fad refers to that which achieves a widespread, if evanescent, popularity. It conveys no value judgement on the ultimate worth of the thing described. The current diet fad is the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet espoused by virtually every nationwide chain of diet centres, by monthly magazine articles, the media advice-givers, professional organisations, and even by federal government bulletins.” Ironically, those are Atkins’ own words. Little did he know when he was writing them that one day his diet would be the latest “fad”, spurned by his death in April after suffering a severe head injury during a fall.
Bad carbohydrates are sugar and white flour, milk and white rice, processed and refined foods of all kinds, junk foods and the like, according to Atkins. But, at least during the weight-loss portion of the Atkins diet, even potentially healthy carbohydrates such as starches and most fruits must be monitored. Once you’ve lost your extra pounds, you introduce minimal starches and fruits to your diet to the degree that they don’t upset your metabolic balance and cause you to start gaining weight again. As for refined foods, they’re a no-no forever.
Atkins said: Our “tough and hardy prehistoric ancestors were not eating devitalised, long shelf-life, processed foods, junk white bread, and pizza around their campfires – and they most certainly were not consuming sugar (as in our soft drinks and juices) when their bodies told them they needed water. If they had been, we never would have made it to civilisation.” However, they were not taking nutritional supplements either, which is what Atkins recommends to restore the nutrients his dieters are not receiving.
Dr Panayiota Protopapa at the Health Ministry agrees with Atkins as far as banishing white flour and synthetic sugar from our diet goes, but stresses she has “never accepted or approved” of the Atkins diet.
“A good diet is one of variety so that our bodies learn how to metabolise food efficiently. It allows us to receive all the necessary nutrients we need,” she told the Sunday Mail.
“I tell my patients to eat small amounts at scheduled times. They should also snack in between and never allow themselves to get hungry.”
Protopapa said it was extremely important to eat a varied diet of predominantly pulses, fish, vegetables and fruit. Meat – preferably white meat – should be restricted to three or four times a week, she said.
Fruit and vegetables – somewhat restricted in the Atkins diet – are particularly important, she said. “The minerals and vitamins we receive from fruit and vegetables help in the reconstruction of DNA and prevent different diseases like cancer,” she said. What’s more, the symptoms of a diet low in natural minerals were not acute. Instead they appear weeks after the diet has begun, Protopapa said. “Although I haven’t heard of anyone becoming sick from the diet, I don’t consider appropriate for my patients’ health and do not recommend it.”
Specialists across both sides of the Atlantic have pointed out that the diet’s safety has yet to be established by a long-term, large-scale clinical trial.
On the other hand, large-scale studies looking at the general effects of eating different kinds of food have yielded a wealth of data.
They showed that people who ate the most carbohydrates had the lowest rates of heart disease. Fibre, found in carbohydrate food, helped the body eliminate toxins and was associated with reduced levels of cholesterol. Carbohydrates were also the source of essential vitamins and plant nutrients, which anyone on the Atkins diet would have to consume as supplements.
A recent study also showed that eating too much fat could double a woman’s risk of breast cancer. Medical Research Council scientists in Cambridge found that women who ate 90 grams of fat a day were twice as likely to develop the disease as women who ate 40 grams.
The Atkins diet could even be responsible for the untimely death of a teenager in America a few years ago. US Paediatrician, Dr Paul Robinson, told Britain’s Daily Mail that, although there was “no outright proof” that the diet caused arrhythmia, which led to the death of a 16-year-old Missouri girl three years ago, he remained “very concerned” that it might have done so.
Health experts have warned that the Atkins diet could increase cholesterol, clog arteries, and in the long term, induce coronary artery disease.
Local cardiologist Pambis Ni
colaides said: “We do not agree with this diet because it advises the consumption of a lot of fat. This in turn creates problems for your arteries. Although it is a diet that might reduce weight, it is a diet high in lipids, one of the risk factors in heart disease, and puts a strain on arteries which can then actually promote coronary heart disease.”
But Atkins claimed not to advocate a high fat diet since the average person on low-carbohydrate diets eats less fat than he or she was eating on a previous ‘balanced’ diet. In fact, he refuted similar criticism to Nicolaides’ and maintained his dieters’ cardiovascular risk factors and overall cholesterol profiles changed for the better. Despite this, in April 2002, he himself was hospitalised after he went into cardiac arrest. However, he publicly denied this was related to his diet in any way.
Nevertheless, nutritionists also describe the diet as a health risk and warn prolonged use could lead to kidney stones and eventual renal failure.
Dietician Despina Avraam said the Atkins diet loaded the kidneys with a lot of excess urine that it could not expel, and which in turn became kidney stones.
“We also eat a lot of fatty meat in Cyprus so that if someone were to follow the diet, their cholesterol levels would not drop,” she said. Avraam warned that cutting out milk and bread from the diet would mean a loss of vital nutrients. “Bread is part of our staple diet and a great part of where we get energy from,” she said. “We cannot go without it.
“The Atkins diet is only good for a week in order to lose two or three kilos and then it must be stopped immediately. Just because Hollywood stars are on it, it doesn’t mean the rest of the world should be,” she quipped.
“Besides it’s also a monotonous diet. There’s so much meat involved and people cannot stick with it for very long,” she said.
The problem is that most people don’t have time to think up imaginative ways to follow the Atkins diet and end up just eating eggs for breakfast, tuna for lunch and chunks of cheese for dinner. After a while, it gets boring and any nutritionist or dose of common sense will tell you that eating the same thing day in day out is unhealthy, as your body stops being able to metabolise food efficiently.
“I just got bored of eating the same thing every day,” one dieter told the Mail. Another said he couldn’t take the bad breath (a ketosis side-effect).
But, according to a source, one young woman even became so dehydrated from being on the diet that she was hospitalised in the UK. Combined with a busy work schedule, the diet left her feeling tired and weak, she said. “She lost 15 kilos in about a month, but is now in hospital because of it. She feels great that she’s lost the weight, but doesn’t feel great physically,” said the source.
Unfortunately a lot of people will do anything to lose weight. As Bob Geldof says of the Atkins diet: “It was brilliant. You die of a heart attack, but so what? You die thin.”
