Hannah Gruen wrote:

<snip excellent post>

> This may be as good a place as any to reiterate the point that Dr.
> Atkins never recommended an extremely low intake of
> carbohydrate-containing foods, except for a few weeks, essentially to
> reduce insulin levels and appetite. He was always in favor of eating
> as many low-starch veggies as you could, along with some low-sugar
> fruits and even limited amounts of whole grains... if the person
> wanted them and was able to tolerate them. But... the myth of Atkins
> as a high meat - low vegetable diet persists, because people who write
> about it too often haven't read the book, or only the first couple
> chapters.
>


Thanks for bringing it back to this. I asked how many of the people who
were calling Atkins a "fad" and a "scam", and call those who follow the
program "idiots" had ever actually *read* Dr. Atkin's New Diet
Revolution. I got no takers.

But you're absolutely right. Atkins *never* advocated a carb-free diet;
the strictest phase, Induction, was never meant to last more than a
couple of weeks, and even that included four servings per day of
vegetables, more than most Americans eat. Carb was then added back to
the diet, in the form of fruits, more vegetables, nuts and seeds, and
yes, even modest servings of whole grains if you found you could
tolerate them (I, by way of example, ate a few Finn Crisp crackers
yesterday -- roughly 12 grams of non-fiber carb worth) until you were
losing slowly but steadily.

People like to scorn Atkins with "Oh, that's that diet where you can eat
all the bacon cheeseburgers you want." That's technically true, but
it's equally accurate to say, "Oh, that's that diet where you can eat
all the grilled salmon and caesar salad you want." But nobody ever says
that, because it's so obviously reasonable.

That some people, simply hearing about the diet, decided that if low
carb was good, no carb was better, or that they should stay on Induction
to lose their weight fast-fast-fast, is not the fault of Robert Atkins.
Nor is the fact that the media never seemed to get past Induction
either, and consistently wrote about the diet as if that were the whole
deal.

You can't make anything fool-proof. Fools are way too persistant for that.

Dana