The Post-Atkins Low Carb Diet
By MARIAN BURROS
Published: January 21, 2004
link to article
THE all-the-steak-you-want diet is no more. If the Atkins diet people are to be believed, it never was. But hundreds of thousands of adherents thought otherwise and reveled in their freedom to eat as much red meat as they liked.
They were shocked and more than a little upset to learn that for five years, according to officials of Atkins Nutritionals, the company set up by Dr. Robert C. Atkins to sell Atkins products and promote the diet, the company's nutritionists have been traveling the country, telling health professionals, but not dieters, to eat no more than 20 percent of their calories from saturated fat. The rest should come from polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat, largely from vegetable oils and fish.
That still leaves room for a lot of steak — 17 ounces of strip steak for someone who eats 1,500 calories a day. For 2,500 calories a day, that is more than a pound and a half.
The level of saturated fat that is permitted in the Atkins diet is still more than in other low-carbohydrate diets, and 60 percent of calories are still supposed to come from fat, although trans fats are not permitted. But setting a limit brings the diet more in line with others, like the South Beach Diet.
The diet industry is still riven by arguments over the best way to lose weight, but many mainstream researchers say that if low-carb diets have moved people away from refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour, they have accomplished something important. And some acknowledge that a low-carb diet fills many people better than a low-fat diet, helping to keep them on the diet.
Still, there are no long-term studies to show that people on low-carb diets keep weight off longer than those on low-fat diets.
Dr. Frank M. Sacks, a professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at the Harvard School of Public Health, has a grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to study which type of diet is the most effective. He and researchers at the Pennington Center at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge are comparing low-carbohydrate diets with traditional low-fat diets, studying 800 overweight people for two years.
"My colleagues in Baton Rouge continue to be strong advocates of low fat, while my colleagues here are in favor of lower carbs and higher unsaturated fat," Dr. Sacks said. "And perhaps at the end of the two-year study, they will know which is the most effective. There could be very real differences between diets. One size may not fit all. There could be physiological reasons or it could be just taste in food. People can be successful at different diets.
"In a pilot study of 100 people, we found the higher-fat Mediterranean diet study produced better long-term weight loss than low-fat, high-carb diets. Participants felt more comfortable eating a moderate-fat diet. It was more tolerable over the long run. There were more foods to eat. It was tastier. The participants didn't feel this was bad medicine, and that may be as important as physiology."
The Mediterranean diet is not a low-carb diet: it limits refined carbohydrates and allows more fat than the Agriculture Department's dietary guidelines, the additional fat being from polyunsaturated and monounsaturated sources.
There are a dozen or more low-carb diets. The best known are the Atkins and South Beach, followed by Protein Power and Sugar Busters.
The author of the South Beach Diet, Dr. Arthur Agatston, has produced a low-carb diet that will not "alienate his more conservative colleagues in the medical profession," said Jonny Bowden, author of "Living the Low Carb Life" (Sterling, 2004). It makes a clear distinction between good fats and bad fats and concentrates on the unsaturated healthy fats.
Still, Dr. Sacks and others, like Dr. George L. Blackburn, associate director in the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Meir Stampfer, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, worry about the levels of saturated fat in some of these diets, as well as the lack of fruits and whole grains.
"For long-term health," Dr. Stampfer said, "you want sources of calories to be healthy and a low-carb option rich in protein from plant sources, fish and poultry, low in saturated fat and without trans fats." If you don't curtail fruits and vegetables, apart from potatoes, he added, the South Beach Diet "is a good bet."
If Dr. Sacks were to choose one diet, he said, it would be South Beach. "I think the South Beach is, by far, the best because it emphasizes the widest variety of healthy foods," he explained. "It includes meat but de-emphasizes meat, and the recipes are interesting and creative, and people will find enough variety and be able to stick with it."
"The Protein Power Diet is a little less extreme than Atkins on the meat side, Dr. Sacks said. "I used to recommend the Zone" — which calls for 40 percent carbohydrates, 30 percent protein and 30 percent fat — "instead of Atkins, but now I recommend the South Beach."
More from NYT/Marian Burros: "The Post-Atkins Low Carb Diet"
Linear Mode
