Atkins Diet Alert Website

[PlainHank]

Hello there!

Can anyone help me regarding this website?

http://www.atkinsdietalert.org/expert.html

Has this been discussed/answered before? What is a newbie to do when confronted with this? How do I respond to my wife? (who found it for me?)

Thanks

[Relief]

the "Physicians Commitee" etc is an arm of / affiliated with PETA the animal rights- vegan activist radicals. they have been spouting this nonsense for a long time. do not be fooled by the professional look of the web site. They are peddling propaganda--not supported by the real science--to futher a vegan agenda. Have your wife go here : http://www.weightoftheevidence.com/ or here: http://www.westonaprice.org/index.html for better science! and here: http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/23 for a little expose of PCRM

[laughingW]

That site is funded by low-fat advocates. The PCRM itself has been denounced by the AMA; it doesn't have a lot of physicians and is deceitful.

While it can look scary to your wife to have "official" organizations like the AHA positioning against low carb, almost all those position papers and scare discussions are from before the last two or three years where so much research is showing that low carb is safe and works better than low-fat.

If she is the type to want endorsement after endorsement, and research after research, you'll be busy but it can be done! Me, I would make a deal to watch your own health numbers get better, and be done with it.

[dvdmon]

Great answers above. I'll just point out a couple of gotchas: the AMA criticized PCRM a while back, but I don't believe it does anymore - at least not concerning it's proposed vegan diet. The AMA I think has said that vegan diets can be healthy if followed correctly. Also, the Activecash site, I believe, is funded by a restaurants lobbying group so you have to take what they say with grain of salt.

That being said, PCRM is linked to PETA both financially and in terms of personnel. Like PETA, it does provocative stunts to gain attention. One of these was when they published the results of the Atkins autopsy, a total breach of privacy and medical ethics. The autopsy seemed to show Atkins having heart disease and obesity. Further analysis and revelations made it clear that the additional weight was due to Atkins being pumped full of fluids in the hospital, and that the "heart disease" was due to a viral infection that he had supposedly picked up while travelling and which was also responsible for his going into cardiac arrest (which he was luckily quickly resusitated from) a year or two before he died. PCRM got this autopsy from a low-fat adherent who claimed he didn't intend for them to publish it, so both are at fault. Basically, they decided the ends (showing the world that the most visible proponent of the modern low-carb diet himself died obese and with heart disease - something that wasn't true, but would still be damaging to the burgeoning low-carb movement), justified the rather sleazy means of leaking a personal and private medical document immediately following Dr. Atkins' death.

[trigger]

My husband and I both lost over 40 lbs three years ago on the Atkins diet. Since then we have strayed and gained most of it back. Ther first part of this year my husband was having health problems reguarding his blood pressure and his chelestrol :question: (know it is misspelled) was over 400. He got a book off TV that was called "natural cures doctors don"t want you to know about" or something like that. Any way he went on a low fat diet eating oatmeal and dry beans almost daily. This worked for what he wanted, his blood pressure went down to normal and his ch? went to 178. He had heard the stories about Dr.Atkins and now I can not get him to believe that low carb and high protien is good because of the ch? levels in most meats. I have been on the protien plan for about four weeks. I have not lost any weight but I believe that I have lost fat and gained muscle because people tell me that I look smaller and my pants are not as tight. I am going to hang in there because I know it works and thanks to the PPLP book I plan to stay on this way of eating for the rest of my life.

[dvdmon]

Trigger, you say you have PPLP? Has your husband read it? It just has loads of info about how low-carb, adequate protein diet improves many health markers for most people, including cholesterol. It also talks about why total cholesterol, and even LDL are not good markers for heart disease risk, and why there are other factors (homocystene, lpa, crp, and LDL subtype to name a few), that give a much better understanding of risk.
That "178" you mention sounds like a total, but has he gotten a full lipid profile done (LDL, HDL, Tris?), or better yet a more sophisticated test that shows the levels of the other factors I mention above?