Atkins

The Atkins Nutritional Approach, popularly known as the Atkins Diet or just Atkins, is the most marketed and well-known low-carbohydrate diet. It was adapted by Dr. more...

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Robert Atkins in the 1960s from a diet he read in the Journal of the American Medical Association and utilized to resolve his own overweight condition following medical school and graduate medical training. After successfully treating over ten thousand patients, he popularized the Atkins diet in a series of books, starting with Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution in 1998. In his revised book, Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, Atkins updated some of his ideas, but remained faithful to the original concepts.

The Atkins franchise, a business formed to provide products to those individuals on the diet, has been highly successful due to the popularity of the diet, and is considered the iconic and driving entity of the larger "low-carb craze". However, various factors have led to its dwindling success and the company founded by Dr. Atkins in 1989, Atkins Nutritionals of Ronkonkoma, New York, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July of 2005, two years after the death of Dr. Atkins. The company re-emerged in January 2006, and the Atkins logo is still highly visible through licensed-proprietary branding for food products and related merchandise.

Nature of the diet

The Atkins Diet represents a departure from prevailing theories. Atkins claimed there are two main unrecognized factors about Western eating habits, arguing firstly that the main cause of obesity is eating refined carbohydrates, particularly sugar, flour, and high-fructose corn syrups; and secondly, that saturated fat is overrated as a nutritional problem, and that only trans fats from sources such as hydrogenated oils need to be avoided. Consequently, Dr. Atkins rejected the advice of the food pyramid, instead asserting that the tremendous increase in refined carbohydrates is responsible for the rise in metabolic disorders of the 20th century, and that the focus on the detrimental effects of dietary fat has actually contributed to the obesity problem by increasing the proportion of insulin-inducing foods in the diet. While most of the emphasis in Atkins is on the diet, nutritional supplements and exercise are considered equally important elements.

Atkins involves the restriction of carbohydrates in order to switch the body's metabolism from burning glucose to burning stored body fat. This process (called lipolysis) begins when the body enters the state of ketosis as a consequence of running out of excess carbohydrates to burn. Dr. Atkins in his book New Diet Revolution claimed that the low-carbohydrate diet produces a "metabolic advantage" where the body burns more calories, overall, than on normal diets, and also expels some unused calories. He cited one study where he estimated this advantage to be 950 calories (4.0 MJ) a day. However, a review study in the Lancet (see below) concluded that there was no metabolic advantage and dieters were simple eating less calories due to the 'monotonous' nature of the diet.

Read more at Wikipedia.org