Tag Archives: Atkins diet

Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It

Time was, many moons ago during the Cold Fusion nonsense, when science journalist Gary Taubes and I did not hit it off. He was incensed that I would write a story about a Texas A&M researcher who insisted he had replicated the (now) infamous Utah claims. I found Taubes to be, well, overbearing.

That was then. Now he’s written a terrific book, finally unmasking the diet hoax the government and Big Health and their press-release-rewriting collaborators in the legacy media (looking at you New York Times) have been pushing all these years, resulting in an obesity epidemic (and a growing diabetes one), which they still refuse to own up to.

Taubes, in essence, has given the Atkins Diet the respectability it has always deserved. Instead, it still is repeatedly tarred by the likes of the NYTimes, the American Heart Association, and the American Medical Association.

A restricted (or, better yet, no) starches, grains and sugars diet was well known to help people lose weight and keep it off, without any threat to their health, at least as far back as 1825. Taubes shows it all, and how it was confirmed by subsequent research and endured as the best advice available until it was undermined by Big Health’s low-fat drivel in the 1960s.

So, if you’re struggling to keep your weight (and blood pressure) down, while eating all that high-sugar, high-carb, low-fat junk the processed food industry churns out, do yourself a favor and get Taubes’s book. He wrote another, high-sciencey one, annotated with all the proofs. But unless you’re especially hard to convince (or you work for Big Health), you can skip that one.

Water intoxication

A young mother in California is dead from water intoxication in a radio station’s competition trying to win a Nintendo Wii video game system for her children. This caught my eye because I’m back on the induction phase of the Atkins diet, which means drinking about 80 ounces of water a day. The difference is I take time to urinate and that was exactly what the competition specified you could not do, while drinking quarts of water. Somebody’s going to be sued, according to the science blog Respectful Insolence:

"Allthough I do not discount individual responsibility, most people are ignorant of how little it can take to cause water intoxication. It is not stated whether (1) contestants were warned that they could die from drinking too much water too fast or (2) qualified medical personnel were present to monitor the contest. In addition, it doesn’t say whether the radio station had vetted its idea with a physician. I doubt that it did, because any competent physician would have told the organizers that this contest was a very bad idea and dangerous, to boot."

Some doctors also think the Atkins diet is dangerous, but I have not found it so. YMMV.