Musings on the Atkins Diet

My father is 86 years old.  He still swims laps on a regular basis, bowls in a league, rides a bicycle during the summer months, and (to my distress) mows his own lawn and does most of his own home repairs.  He is as healthy as an old guy can be.  Sometime in his 70s, my sister persuaded Dad to go on the Atkins Diet™.  Though having been a rail of a man his whole life, he (like most in their later years) gradually began to put on weight in his 60s and 70s to the point of being officially overweight.  

The new diet was magical.  He ate meat and salad, no fruit, hardly any other vegetables, no bread, no sugar, and lots…I mean LOTS of fat.  Cream, half & half, mayonnaise by the gallon jugs, eggs galore, cheese, nuts.  And, guess what?  He lost weight.  Within a year or two, he was trim and feeling better than ever… except for the high blood pressure, and the high cholesterol, and the constipation, and the achy muscles, and the medications to manage them all.

 

So is Atkins™ all that it’s cracked up to be?  It has a lot of followers and actually works for weight loss.  But is it healthy?

Before I understood anything about healthy fat (read more about this) and the dangers of the conventional diet (i.e. low-fat), I worried about the amount of fat my dad was consuming on this diet.  Sure, I was happy he’d cut out sugar…I always knew sugar was bad, but I was convinced that fat was going to kill him for sure!   

Now that I can rest easy about the fat myth, I revisit this issue from another perspective:  NUTRITION.  Weight management is important, but not at the expense of nutrition.  I believe we can have both.

Some of the things Dad eats that I have a problem with:

    Diet soft drinks by the case.  Why?  Artificial sweeteners, chemicals, food color.

     “Sugar-free” desserts.  Why?  Artificial sweeteners, chemicals, food color.

     Bacon, sausage, jerky.  Why?  Sodium nitrate, sodium nitrite.

     Mayonnaise (in large quantities).  Why?  Soy bean oil in large quantities.

     Gravy.  Why?  MSG.

     Soy bean oil (in just about every salad dressing on the market).  Why?  Soy bean oil.

What Dad doesn’t eat because of “too many” carbs:

    Fresh fruit (loaded with vitamins, fiber, and antioxidants)

     Most vegetables, but especially carrots, beets, yams (loaded with vitamins, fiber, and antioxidants)

     Honey, raw or otherwise (raw honey contains healthy enzymes and contributes to immune system health)

    Home made soups (loaded with vitamins and minerals when made from bone broth and fresh vegetables
                   

Rather than minimizing or eliminating unhealthy foods, such as sugar and wheat, and changing ones eating paradigm, the Atkins Diet™ encourages its participants to merely replace the bad things they like with chemical-laden false-food substitutes—even to the point of marketing a whole line of processed “foods” designed to do just that.  What they end up doing is replacing one kind of unhealthy thing with another.

Now, don't get me wrong-- I'm not trying to take on the Atkins establishment in this post.  Eating low-carb has been a proven remedy for obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome, as well as many other ailments.  (Check out Gary Taubes' work on the benefits of low-carb diets in Why We Get Fat, and Good Calories Bad Calories.)  But in today’s ultra-processed food environment, our health is being bombarded by much more than just carbohydrates.  (See my post on yellow food color, "Yellow...but not mellow".)  The closer we can get to natural food, the happier our bodies will be. 

Why not combine the Atkins principles of restricting carbohydrates (particularly sugar and wheat, which are the most unhealthy) with a passion for farm-fresh food.  Choose your meat and dairy from pastured animals. Select organic fruits and vegetables as often as possible - or grow your own.  Shop from local farmer's markets as often as you can.  And cook your own food.  And on the occasion that you need to buy packaged foods - read labels and avoid anything that you can't identify in your mind's eye as an actual food (example:  carnauba wax!). 

Well, Dad's not there yet...and perhaps he never will be.  He is 86, after all, and rather stuck in his ways.  But, being the fanatic that I am, I'm still working on him.  My next challenge is to get him off his statin drugs...a topic for another post.