Atkins Diet: what's wrong with it?(Cover Story)

For nearly 30 years, the nutrition establishment has denounced the diet promulgated by Dr. Robert C. Atkins for its unsound high-fat, ultra-low-carbohydrate regimen. As recently as last year, an expert panel of nutritionists convened by the American Heart Association condemned it as ineffective and very possibly a health hazard.

Yet "Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution" is still flying off the bookstore shelves. Of the 10 best-selling diet authors we asked about in our questionnaire, Atkins stood out from the rest. Eighteen percent of all the dieters said they'd read one of his books. That was more than four times as many as had read any of the others. And 34 percent said that his advice helped them to lose weight and keep it off.

Although the original version of the Atkins diet has been around since the 1970s, "Atkins has overpromoted it without data, and doctors have criticized it without data," says Gary Foster, Ph.D., clinical director of the weight-and eating-disorders program at the University of Pennsylvania.

To fill that gap, Foster and collaborators at the University of Colorado Health Science Center and at the Washington University School of Medicine rounded up 42 overweight volunteers. They sent half of them home with instructions to follow the diet in the Atkins book. That meant they were allowed to eat as much protein and fat as they wanted, including steaks, butter, cheese, eggs, and oils, but absolutely no carbohydrates other than a few cups of salad greens or the equivalent each day. The second group followed a standard low-fat, low-calorie, high-carbohydrate diet.

After 12 weeks, 7 of the original 21 low-fat dieters had quit, while only 2 of the Atkins group had dropped out. Moreover, the Atkins dieters had already lost an average of nearly 19 pounds, compared with an average loss of just 712 pounds for the low-fat dieters.

Atkins' harshest critics say that the program is dangerous; eating all that animal fat and cholesterol is bound to do dreadful things to your cardiovascular system, they argue. So the researchers measured the study subjects' "good" and "bad" cholesterol levels as well as their triglycerides (another indicator of heart-disease risk: the lower, the better). The findings, which have been presented at scientific meetings but not yet published, were mixed. Blood levels of both good and bad cholesterol went up in the Atkins group and down in the low-fat group. Triglycerides dropped more in the Atkins group than in the group on the low-fat regimen.

"If I had to say whether the Atkins diet is good or ...