It sounds too good to be true: Eat all the meat and fat you want and still lose weight. But small clinical trials show that Atkins does help peel off the pounds. What’s more, the regimen appears to help raise HDL cholesterol (the good kind) and lower triglycerides, another fat in the blood that is connected with risk of heart disease. One potential problem: the flood of low-carb foods - all typically high in calories - now on the market. Calories count, and gnoshing on too many “carb-free” snacks will only put the pounds back on.
Is the diet healthy? Debatable: The Induction phase is highly unbalanced, with a mere 20 grams of carbohydrate per day. In the short term, you take off pounds, and blood lipids (cholesterol, triglycerides) seem to improve. But nutritionists balk at the high fat and saturated fat content of the steaks, chops, and other foods that Atkins promotes. Also unclear: the health impact of a lifetime of restricted carbs and high protein.
What do the experts say? Registered dietitian Jane Kirby, author of ‘Dieting for Dummies,’ second edition (Wiley Publishing Inc., 2004), gives the plan a thumbs-down. “Most nutritionists recommend that 55 to 60 percent of your calories come from carbohydrate,” Kirby says. “With a 1,500-calorie weight-loss diet, that would add up to 188 to 225 grams of carbs per day. Even the maintenance phase, which recommends 40 to 60 grams, is far too low.”
Weight-loss researcher Gary Foster, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, admits he’s surprised by the fact that the Atkins diet, while successful at producing weight loss, doesn’t seem to raise the risk of high cholesterol and heart disease. “We thought that the harmful effects of a low-carb Atkins-style diet might be the high amounts of saturated fat,” says Foster, who recently published a one-year study comparing Atkins and a more traditional weight-loss diet. “And that turned out not to be true, at least at the one-year mark.” So Foster is working on a longer diet comparison study, this one for five years.
Bottom Line: This one’s a puzzler. No nutritionist in her right mind would endorse a bonanza of high-fat, high-saturated fat foods like bacon, steak, cheese. Although Atkins is an average diet plan, it’s just not in the same league with today’s top diets like Nutrisystem or Medifast.
Hi, I'm a dietitian with experience in hundreds of weight loss programs and fad diets. When forming my list of the
While I did lose weight on Atkins, all that extra protein was too hard on my kidneys and I suffered kidney stones. On the advice of my doctor I had to stop the Atkins regimen.
Atkins worked great for me and my husband. His cholesterol went from a whopping 460 (on 80 mg lipitor and Ornish and PRitikin) to 165 with a better ratio too. My triglycerides went from 1500 to 100. We both lost over 30 pounds in a few months . The only problem was that we craved fruit in the summer. We then found that berries and melon seemed to be ok. Don’t use the atkins bars. Use regular food and don’t use “low carb” snack junk food and it is great. There was just an article in the NY Times about how the false rumors that fats were bad. (trans fats are the only bad fat) Check it out in the times how bad rumors start and why Atkins continues to work despite the food pyramid–it was all from a game of doctors playing “telephone”