What If Both the Medical Establishment and Dr. Robert Atkins Have Promoted Big Fat Lies About Low-Carb and Low-Fat?

WHAT IF IT’S ALL BEEN A BIG FAT LIE? This was the title of an article published by the New York Times Sunday Magazine on July 7, 2002, authored by Gary Taubes. Taubes contends that, after more than 30 years of attack by the American medical Establishment, the well-known champion of the low-carbohydrate diet, Dr. Robert Atkins, may have been right after all.

Further, he argues, it may be the medical Establishment’s own dietary recommendation to eat less fat and more carbohydrates that’s actually the root cause of the burgeoning obesity epidemic that has a stranglehold on the American population.

There are many important issues surrounding this debate. The first and most important one concerns the SOLITARY focus on DIET COMPOSITION as the primary factor under-girding the obesity and overweight epidemic. A second issue is the majority opinion that a high consumption of dietary fat is the cause of obesity.

This second point, however, must not be viewed in isolation because it’s also the majority opinion that fat and its associated components such as cholesterol are the primary cause of the so-called heart disease epidemic.

We must, therefore, keep at the forefront of our thinking the fact that fat has been implicated as the cause of both epidemics. As a result of this belief, DIET COMPOSITION tops the list of factors that contribute to the increased rates of both obesity and heart disease.

In 2002, the fat-theory-as-cause of these two conditions is being discredited. Comfort-desiring Americans found solace in the idea that our medical and scientific specialists had uncovered the cause of these two conditions.

Although it’s a widely held belief that fat is an evil and deadly substance, the public remained confused as to the best methods to control their ever-expanding waistlines. Clearly, they were comfortable with the idea that eating less fat was heart-protective, but the failure of low-fat foods to solve their weight control problem proved that something was very wrong about what it took to control bodyweight.

Acknowledgement of these observations is a recent phenomenon: Interested observers are beginning to question the supposed efficacy of the low-fat eating recommendations after 30 years of our national experiment with low-fat eating.

Some have surmised, as does Gary Taubes, that the rise in obesity meshes quite well with the beginning of the low-fat experiment. More importantly, and the very basis of his article, is the fact that some of our medical elite have also made this same observation: obesity may, in someway, be partly related to low-fat eating.

Dr. Robert Atkins’s rise to fame began with his publication in 1972 of DR. ATKINS DIET REVOLUTION. His book met with much criticism from the scientific and medical Establishments, but the public gobbled it up in spite of the harsh criticism.

He has been much maligned by the scientific and medical Establishments since then, and these attacks are no less vicious today than they were in 1972. But, the cracks in the walls are getting deeper, and according to reports, Atkins, while alive. had been asked to speak at several major medical schools about his findings.

But, as you’ll soon see, the Atkins’s approach is as seriously flawed as the low-fat diet, but for different physiological reasons.

What Contribution Has Taubes’ Article Made to the Debate?

What has Taubes’ article accomplished? Well, it certainly flushed out the talking heads.

The proponents of all the different dietary schools of thought have voiced their concerns. There’s Dr. Dean Ornish, the vegetarian zealot, who pontificates that eating pork rinds and sausage is dietary suicide. Dr. Andrew Weil, champion of the high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet program, shares with the world his contrarian view concerning the low-carbohydrate regimen despite the fact that he’s so fat it should be obvious to any one that he can’t make a real contribution to the dialogue.

Taubes’ article did nothing to change anybody: in fact, it solidified each expert’s position because these people can’t possibly ever admit that they were wrong. We’d all know, then, that they hadn’t done their homework and that they were largely ignorant of the facts that underlie obesity.

More important, however, is the fact that the article dragged the American people out of their comfort zone, dispelling their belief that it had all been figured out for them. Now they’re concerned that we really don’t know what’s going on and that our unchallenged reliance on medicine and science may have been misguided.

So a number of fundamental, cherished beliefs are now tarnished, and people just don’t know what to do. Everyone’s getting fatter, and even if people aren’t overweight, many have too much fat on their bodies, and too little muscle, making for an unsightly and uncomfortable appearance.

So, if people were confused before, with all the hundreds, indeed thousands, of weight control opinions buzzing around, they’re even more confused now with the release of Taubes’ paradigm-shifting article.

In the aftermath of the article, web chat rooms and forums were besieged with cries for help. The news media scrambled to set up interviews with anyone who had an opinion. Unceasing chatter filled people’s discourse and minds. Everyone was trying to figure out what it all meant.

Unbelievably, the article has elevated the issue to one of the top news items of the day. But more importantly, it demonstrates how thoroughly confused everyone is about what to do about bodyweight regulation. The single-minded focus on DIET COMPOSITION as the controlling factor in overweight and obesity obscures all the more important factors in seeking workable solutions to weight control.

And no one, not the media, not the expert interviewees, has derailed the attempt to keep us focused on DIET COMPOSITION which plays only a minor role in bodyweight regulation.

The Failure to Move DIET COMPOSITION from Center Stage Seriously Hampers Finding Effective Strategies People Can Use to Reach Their Goals

It’s clear that people have been, and are, unable to control their bodyweight, no matter what diet they follow, Atkins’s diet included. They’re lost souls because nothing they have done works; they just keep getting fatter or fail to lose any weight when they try. Taubes’s article, therefore, opened Pandora’s box, raising, as it did, more questions, yet at the same time, providing few answers or solutions.

So, now it boils down to a few renegade physicians, scrambling off the sinking ship, slipping and sliding on a deck greased with the failed remains of the low-fat dogma. The renegade doctors and scientists became renegades because they were among the very few who actually did what doctors are supposed to do: they observed. They saw colleagues losing weight when following Atkins’s low-carbohydrate diet even though they had trashed the man for more than 30 years. One doctor was quoted as saying that he paid no attention to Atkins because he, and all his colleagues, thought that he was a jerk.

The U.S. government never funded studies to look at the low-carbohydrate diet. Now, Taubes tells us, it’s willing to provide such funding because of pressure from the renegade doctors. Interestingly, when the renegades talk openly to their fellow physicians, who are still faithful to the low-fat regimen, they are shouted down because, again, to admit misunderstanding and a lack of knowledge isn’t a common characteristic of medical doctors.

Everyone has an opinion, but despite that fact, it seems that there’s a profound shortage of knowledge and facts about what is involved in controlling one’s weight and, in particular, the role that DIET COMPOSITION plays. Now, it seems that some, still only a few, researchers want to test the Atkins’s diet, and other versions of low-carbohydrate diets, a desire shared by a group of other low-carbohydrate supporters. Having dissed the low-carbohydrate diet for more than 30 years, these doctors now propose studying it!

Unfortunately, they don’t have the training, or experience, or slightest clue as to the sort of questions that should be asked in designing the studies. They’re wholly ignorant of the volumes of existing scientific literature that are already available, literature that addresses many of the questions they’re asking.

They want to do it all over again as if it hasn’t already been done. But it has. And to whom are they turning for guidance? None other than the redoubtable Dr. Robert Atkins.

Is this a good choice? That answer is easy. No. In fact, it’s a very poor choice. Why? Because it’s clear that many people fail to achieve bodyweight regulation when following the Atkins version of the low-carbohydrate diet. Some succeed, but that number represents only a small percentage of all those who have followed this regimen.You didn’t know this? Just visit any of the low-carbohydrate chat rooms. Or talk to colleagues at work — or people you meet at social functions.

Millions Have Tried the Atkins’s Plan

And many millions have failed to lose weight or to lose as much weight as they’ve wanted. What’s the main complaint? They all say it: it’s the Plateau in losing weight where weight loss simply ceases. No matter how much they cut their carbs, no matter how much they try to stay in ketosis (Atkins’ magic land of weight loss success), they can’t do it.

Ketosis also stops, along with the weight loss, somewhere around weeks 3-5 of the plan. If they’re one of the fortunate 25%, they lose some weight, but even these people reach a Plateau, stalled in their efforts to lose more weight. They have no idea what to do about it, and Atkins’s solutions simply don’t work, despite his claims that they do.

What is at the Apex of Bodyweight Regulation?

What, then, is at the apex of bodyweight regulation? One thing and One thing Only: the much-maligned calorie. Now, that seems rather simple doesn’t it? You may even have heard about this calorie thing already. But, I’ll tell you: It’s not simple. It’s very complex, and if you don’t understand every aspect of calorie control, you’re doomed. The secret resides, therefore, in the balance between the calories you consume and the calories you burn. I call this the Energy Balance Equation.

I understand its complexities, and I’ll teach them to you. When I do, your confusion will melt like butter in a hot pan. I can make you an expert in the nuances of bodyweight regulation. And quickly. There’s simply no question about the factness of this Law regarding the calorie. It’s the Law of Nature.

And no one can get away with breaking Mother Nature’s Laws. It’s worse than trying to cheat on your taxes, trying to get away with breaking the Laws of Mother Nature. Don’t bother mounting an argument against them because you’ll lose.

OK, if it’s this simple, then why is everyone so confused? Because it has never been made clear that this is the One and Only Fact you must first know before you try anything else. You’ve been hoodwinked into believing that DIET COMPOSITION is the most important factor in bodyweight regulation. Taubes’ article only reinforces that notion, further clouding truth-seeking.

You can now easily see the myopia in all the competing camps because DIET COMPOSITION has been their focus, one way or another, for decades. There has been no effort to prioritize the facts involved in the successful regulation of bodyweight. Does the low-carbohydrate diet work? Yes. Do I support a low-carbohydrate diet? Yes, but only the correct version.

Why does it work? It works for one reason and one reason only: It reduces food consumption, thereby reducing calorie intake. It adheres to the Laws of Nature. Does this automatic reduction in food intake work for everyone? Absolutely not. Why? I don’t know. It works in varying degrees: in some, it reduces food intake significantly, and in others, not at all. Then it fails.

But, no matter what, DIET COMPOSITION and the low-carbohydrate diet are only part of what I call the 100% Weight Loss and Weight Control Solution. Why does one stall out in his weight loss when following the Atkins’s version — and also the others — of the low-carbohydrate diet? Because as one loses weight, his calorie needs decrease, so he must eat less to continue losing or to maintain the new, lower bodyweight.

And the decreasing calorie needs gradually overcome the ability of the low-carbohydrate diet to reduce food intake automatically. At this juncture, the individual must be acutely aware of his calorie intake and reduce food consumption so that weight loss can proceed.

I detail this whole process in my chapters about DIET COMPOSITION and in my Dr. Ellis’s 100/100 Plan and in Dr. Ellis’s version of the low-carbohydrate diet. I have counseled Atkins’s failures for more than 10 years, and this is no small number.

Our Establishment weight loss experts, whose own dietary advice has failed, now propose siding with Atkins, whose dietary advice also has failed. Even if a fairy godmother tapped these doctors on the head with her smart-stick, 50 years from now they’d undoubtedly know little more than they know today because they have no experience and no knowledge of any of this. They simply don’t even know what questions to ask; that’s why they’re blindly turning to Atkins. And Atkins is grinning like a Cheshire cat. But he shouldn’t be because he’s wrong too.

So Both Stances Have Been Big Fat Lies

The docs are just as confused as the public. They’ll study the low-carbohydrate diet to death, something that has already been done, and they’ll come up with more incorrect theories and misinformation, just as they did when they bought into the low-fat diet scam in the first place — all because they don’t know what they’re doing. Why, indeed, would you expect anything else?

They couldn’t figure it out in the last half-century, so what changes have occurred that will make comprehension happen today? Taubes’s and the renegade medical doctors’s observations suggest that low-fat eating is partly responsible for the overweight epidemic.

Does it follow then that we should hand over the responsibility of determining which dietary regimen is the better one to the same medical Establishment that gave us the false recommendations in the first place?

This institution took more than 30 years to make the INESCAPABLE OBSERVATION that the low-fat diet is implicated in weight gain. Now, how long will it take them to discover this same truth, not just by observation but by science, and to then arrive at some conclusions about the physiological and biochemical processes involved?

I argue that they simply will not be able to do it under any circumstance, particularly if they base their initial studies on the flawed version of the low-carbohydrate diet that Atkins has had on the table for the last 30 years.

The science has been around for more than fifty years. The low-carbohydrate diet was exhaustively studied, particularly by Dr. John Yudkin, who published his seminal paper back in 1960, having found the same thing that the more recent studies are finding.

Why must we repeat studying what we already know?

Now, if you want, you can wait around until this new group of scientists, who haven’t studied the historical records, perform the same research all over again, or better yet, you can read all about it now: every last detail and piece of information that you need and want. You can end the confusion immediately. And this includes our scientists too because I’ve pulled it all together for them as well.

Do you want to wait or… do you want it today? I have written 600 pages of SOLUTIONS.

Why me? I got fat, really fat, at age 12. I spent the next 43 years of my life researching every aspect of how the body, itself, regulates its weight. And do you know what I discovered? Everything. I learned it all.

And I can tell you accurately, precisely, and exactly how you can succeed. You see, bodyweight is governed by the Laws of Nature, and we all must obey these inviolate Laws — or we’re doomed to fail. What is the flaw in the Atkins’s version of the low-carbohydrate diet? Atkins denies the Law of Nature, and instead claims that the calorie theory is a myth, exalting carbohydrates as the primary regulator of bodyweight. This notion lead to many flaws in his program’s design. His success, limited as it is, has been achieved because of the powerful effect that carbohydrate reduction has on reducing food intake.

What Does Biochemistry Have to Do With It?

Taubes tells us about the growth in the understanding of Endocrinology 101, a term coined by Harvard researcher David Ludwig. It’s Ludwig’s contention that Endocrinology 101 was poorly understood during the 1960’s when the whole anti-fat dogma was fueled by the belief that fat was the cause of heart disease.

In conflict with Ludwig’s argument, however, is the historical fact that Endocrinology 100 (which preceded 101 by about 100 years) was all very well worked out by 1960. Therefore, all the elemental science was in place for those scientists who might have chosen to read it and, hence, we could have avoided the decisions that have taken the country down the wrong road for the last 40 years.

Important to any discussion about DIET COMPOSITION is the understanding, well known already by 1960 and first discovered in 1852, that carbohydrates turn on a process in the body in which they are rapidly converted to body fat.

Carbohydrates have been the darlings of nutrition scientists for decades. It was believed, and still is today, that carbohydrates are the primary source of fuel for all of the organs and tissues of the body. In fact, as late as 1966, many researchers believed that carbohydrates provided 100% of the fuel needs of exercising muscle.

We know now, in 2002, that 80% of the fuel requirements in resting man are supplied by fat and that 75% or more of the fuel needs of exercising muscles are supplied by fat. As I’ve said, the fact that carbohydrates are rapidly converted to body fat was known by 1960, and it was also known that eating fat, and no carbohydrates, abolishes entirely the process that leads to increases in body fat stores. But no one seemed to read the papers, certainly not those who were responsible for dictating public dietary policy.

The low-carbohydrate diet has a long history, dating back to the early 1800’s. It had been trotted out publicly by the 1920’s and was introduced nationally on a very large scale during the 1950’s as the Dupont diet because Dr. Alfred Pennington introduced it to the corpulent executives of the Dupont company in Wilmington, Delaware. It was highly publicized in HOLIDAY magazine and picked up the moniker of the HOLIDAY diet. By the time Atkins wrote his book, the diet had been used for decades.

Where did Atkins go wrong in damning the calorie theory? Well, we need a little more history to get that answer. It has been well known for 150 years, at least, that man is held accountable by the Laws of Thermodynamics, the Laws of Conservation of Energy.

This, of course, is the Energy Balance Equation: calories in vs. calories out. Nutritionists have long accepted the calorie theory, and to help them understand the causes of obesity, they gathered information about what people ate and how much physical activity they performed.

Interestingly, the self-reports of the overweight and obese indicated that they didn’t eat more food than normal weight people. So the idea arose that obese people had a metabolic defect, a disease.

Do you think this made a confusing situation even more confusing? You bet it did. Around 1983, Dr. Dale Schoeller of the University of Wisconsin really threw a monkey wrench into the wheels of obesity-theories by introducing a new technique, doubly-labeled water: a method that allows scientists to accurately measure people’s calorie burn over a period of several weeks.

Extensive studies were undertaken using the doubly-labeled water technique after about 1990. It was inarguably discovered that the obese didn’t, in fact, require the same number of calories as their normal weight counterparts.

What was, in fact, discovered is that they burned MORE calories and that calorie burning was related to bodyweight. The results of these studies trashed at least 75 years of nutritional scientific findings, as well as existing theories.

These facts, of course, invalidate the nonsense spewing out of the mouth of Kevin Trudeau, the infomercial salesman selling Atkins’s video tapes. Trudeau tells us, with great aplomb, the fact that thin people can eat all that they want, while fat people, eating the same amount, keep gaining.

This is why confusion reigns: People with no training, infomercial salesmen, and doctors too, spew endless amounts of misinformation every day and in every way. It’s now known that all people tend to under-report how much food they eat by a whopping 20-50%! They also over-report their physical activity by about 50%.

This is what caused Atkins to reject the calorie theory. He’d ask his new clients what they ate, and they, in turn, under-reported the amount they ate, and he believed them. In my book, I detail Atkins’s misunderstandings through an exhaustive analysis of his faulty beliefs. Atkins would put the client on a low-carbohydrate diet of a known calorie content, which was higher in calories than the amount the subject REPORTED that he consumed previously.

Thus, he developed his idea of Metabolic Advantage, his belief that a low-carbohydrate diet allowed its followers to lose weight while consuming more food than those on mixed diets. This, of course, is a mistaken assumption.

We can calculate people’s calorie needs based on formulas because we are not very different from one another. There’s no such thing as a fast or slow metabolism despite what most people believe. Calorie needs are based on body size and on the amount of physical activity we perform; it’s that simple.

What of the low-carbohydrate diet? I detail all of this in my grand opus, Dr. Gregory Ellis’s Ultimate Diet Secrets. In short, carbohydrates are converted to body fat; they’re not the preferred fuel of the body’s tissues, and they do send a signal to the body to store this fuel as fat. The main hormonal signal for this is a shift in the ratio of the two pancreatic hormones, glucagon and insulin.

Most authorities implicate insulin as the primary driver of this process, but it is, rather, the digested carbohydrate itself, glucose or blood sugar, that drives this process. In fact, there’s a whole metabolic shift that occurs in the body under the influence of carbohydrate eating that turns the body into a highly efficient fat-making plant, even down to an increase in the genes that manufacture the enzymes responsible for converting carbohydrate fuel into fat.

And what happens to appetite and hunger when carbohydrates are converted to fat? The blood is cleared of fuel, and the active tissues, denied fuel, send a feeding signal to the brain that drives appetite. The result? Overeating. This is what I call starvation in the face of obesity — both processes occurring simultaneously. More about this shortly.

Is DIET COMPOSITION the Most Important Factor in Bodyweight Regulation?

Taubes attempts to reconcile some of the other issues that may underlie the obesity epidemic. But, here again, we get more questions than answers. He interviewed Dr. William Dietz, who runs the nutrition division of the Centers for Disease Control, about the role of too little physical activity in the etiology of obesity. Dietz denies a relationship and points to the increase in leisure exercise mania that has occurred since about 1970, citing that this apparent increase in daily physical activity did nothing to stop the burgeoning increase in weight gain.

This suggested to him that physical activity isn’t implicated as a cause of the obesity epidemic. He doesn’t understand, however, that as leisure exercise increased, total daily physical activity decreased to an even larger extent so that total daily calorie burning is less now than it was 30 years ago.

This is a process that’s been on-going in the increasingly-mechanized Western nations ever since the end of World War II. Most scientists have concluded that the obesity epidemic is LARGELY a function of the decrease in daily physical activity and that it has little to do with food intake.

But what they don’t know is that the decrease in physical activity, itself, has a direct impact on food intake because inactive people fail to achieve an intake of food that adjusts itself downward to match their decreased physical activity. This is the case because a too-low level of physical activity actually drives people to eat more food than they really need.

This extremely important but little-known fact was discovered more than 50 years ago by Dr. Jean Mayer. Recently Dr. Dale Schoeller has re-validated Mayer’s research by using doubly-labeled water, a technique far more sophisticated than the tools available to Dr. Mayer in the 1950’s.

Unfortunately, current-day scientists consistently miss the actual contribution of DIET COMPOSITION to the obesity and over-fat epidemic because they have universally bought into all the beliefs that sanctify the low-fat dogma. This is scientific Reductionism at its grandest — and worst.

I discuss these details extensively in Ultimate Diet Secrets. As a side note, Dr. Dale Schoeller supports the idea that decreased physical activity is one of the main causes of the obesity epidemic. Dr. William Dietz, as we’ve observed, has denied this relationship. Since Dr. Dietz and Dr. Schoeller have co-authored scientific papers, it’s surprising that Dietz is unaware of Schoeller’s research. It’s noteworthy that Dietz has also used the doubly-labeled water technique in his studies.

So even at the level of the scientist, there’s mass confusion, and Taubes is unable to provide any resolution because he’s a journalist and must rely solely on the opinions of those he interviews. And those opinions do nothing to provide answers to the public’s dilemma. I am a scientist, and because of my many year’s investigation into every aspect of bodyweight regulation, I can clear the air because this is what I have spent 43 years studying — and doing.

The Fat Theory of Heart Disease

The fat theory of heart disease was first proposed in 1953 by Dr. Ancel Keys of the University of Minnesota. Keys’s study was a study in scientific skulduggery because it was later uncovered that his data didn’t reflect the facts about the relationship between diet and heart disease.

Soon after the release of Keys’s findings, many scientists showed that the fat theory of heart disease was false and untrue. Their research and evidence, however, didn’t stop the burgeoning juggernaut led largely by the American Heart Association’s fueling of the fire. And Keys’s study still serves as the Rock of Gibraltar for the proponents of the fat theory of heart disease.

After two decades of ongoing research, Dr. George Mann declared irrevocably that “saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet are not the cause of coronary heart disease. That myth is the greatest scientific deception of this century, perhaps of any century.”

Taubes was able to uncover these shenanigans because the facts about the invalidity of the fat theory of heart disease are well covered in the scientific literature, not hidden behind locked doors like information about the Kennedy assassination. Taubes says, “The case was eventually settled not by science but by politics.”

False as it is, the fat theory of heart disease came to be closely associated with the idea that fat causes obesity. The public was never fully informed as to the logic behind decreasing dietary fat as that logic was understood by nutritionists.

Fat contains 9 calories per gram, while carbohydrates contain less than half that amount, 4 calories per gram. The promoters of reducing fat intake reasoned that people would reduce their calorie intake by 50% if they substituted carbohydrates for fat. But it didn’t work. The take-home message for the people was that fat, itself, made one fat. In a too simplistic sense, they came to the notion that the fat eaten becomes, directly, fat on one’s body.

This, of course, was in direct conflict with the scientific fact that few knew: it’s actually carbohydrates that turn to fat. Fat, when eaten with few carbohydrates, provides the necessary calories and fuel for the active tissues, thereby reducing food intake.

Carbohydrates drive an increased food intake because they are stored as fat, which eliminates the availability of their calories and fuel to the active tissues. The tissues, at that point, are starving and do what they need to do to get the fuel they want: they tell the feeding centers of the brain to send out hunger signals so that the animal (the human being) will follow his in-born biological drives and get some food. Unfortunately, the now-educated animal eats carbohydrates and sets into motion a vicious cycle of getting fat in the face of starvation. What a biological catastrophe.

Scientists, specializing in the study of what drives appetite and hunger, have convincingly shown that we don’t eat for the number of calories that go into the mouth: appetite and hunger are controlled by fuel availability. Food that’s stored (carbohydrates stored as fat) is no longer available to be burned.

We must then eat more to provide fuel to the active tissues. This desire to eat is a biological drive and is not easily overcome by willpower. Plus, people have been taught that hunger signals must be obeyed.

Of course, if the food you’re eating is stored as fat, hunger signals arising from the depletion of fuel in the blood will spell disaster for bodyweight regulation. This process is profoundly turned-on in people who have lost weight, making it difficult for them to avoid weight gain relapse.

And when the body is actively converting carbohydrates into fat, any ingested fat gets carried along for the ride into fat storage in the fat cells. This storage of ingested fat as body fat, however, doesn’t easily occur when the diet is carbohydrate-reduced.

So, it’s actually a mixed diet of carbohydrate and fat, the supermarket diet, that drives weight gain, and the real culprit is the carbohydrate, not the fat, because carbohydrates create a nutritional and hormonal environment that sets the stage for fuel storage as fat. Fat merely piggybacks along (via some complicated enzymatic changes in the fat and muscle cells) for the ride into fat storage because the fat-making and fat-storage machinery are revved up into a high gear.

Most people’s low-fat diets contain enough fat and carbohydrate to qualify as a supermarket diet. In a recent survey I conducted, I discovered that 70% of the people I polled believed that fat was more of an issue in bodyweight regulation than calories. A fatal misunderstanding! So Americans were granted a license to eat all the low-fat food that they wanted. And they did, decreasing, at the same time, how much they moved.

One could not have a more deadly prescription.

And the Atkins’s plan? Why does it fail so miserably? For the same reason that the low-fat diet fails. He grants people a license to eat all the protein and fat foods that they want as long as they restrict carbohydrates. Will this work? It works a little better than the low-fat protocol but still not very well.

One group says, “Eat all you want of this food type.” Another says, “Eat all you want of this other food type.” You just can’t eat whatever you want because you must match what you eat to what you burn in order to stay in calorie and bodyweight balance. I teach special techniques that help people control these processes.

Since bodyweight regulation is controlled by the Laws of Nature, adherence to those Laws guarantees 100% success rates. This is what I call Dr. Gregory Ellis’s 100% Weight Loss and Weight Control Solution.

If you do what I recommend, you cannot fail.

In summary, Gary Taubes’ article does nothing to allay the confusion; it only adds to it. He must rely on what he believes is expert opinion; in fact, however, it is little more than misinformation. Misinformation, needless to say, triggers only more questions, not answers.

He tells us that it all may be settled sooner rather than later and we might have some long-awaited answers as to why we grow fat and whether it is indeed preordained by societal forces or by our choices of foods. And he places his faith for the uncovering of the answers in the very same doctors who failed to figure it out during the last 40 years. How does he expect doctors, who had no clue for 40 years, to become enlightened — all of a sudden? He’s wrong, of course; we have all the answers right now.

I wrote them all in my book, Dr. Gregory Ellis’s Ultimate Diet Secrets. And I, unlike my scientific brethren, knew what questions to ask because I have personally done everything there is to do in the bodyweight regulation game. After I solved my own obesity problem, I decided to develop a good physique. But to do that I had to go the extra mile because developing a good physique means paying exquisite attention to details.

So as our scientists plunge into a study of the flawed Atkins’s program, little new light will be shed on bodyweight regulation because Atkins disavows the Energy Balance Equation. It’ll take them at least ten years to figure out the flaws in the Atkins’s plan, and then, instead of realizing that the problem is directly related to the faultiness of Atkins’s basic premise, they’ll blame the low-carbohydrate diet and thus send us all off on another 20 years of wild goose chasing.

There’s no longer any need, however, to wait for the answers people need. Every single one of them is already written in the pages of my book. We need no further studies; and we don’t need to wait 40 more years to get the information that’s available today.

Gregory Ellis, PhD
Certified Nutrition Specialist
July 23, 2002

Dr. Atkins’s Low-Carb Plan Has Many Problems

Serious Flaws in the Design of the Atkins’s Low-Carb Diet Sabotage Unwitting Dieters

If you have heart trouble go to a cardiologist. If you need dietary info go to a nutritional biochemist who has personal experience in being overweight and solving the problem. Atkins was a cardiologist.

Atkins’s low-carb plan claimed that carbohydrates were the primary cause of overweight, and relegated calorie control to the trashbin:

• this mistake led to a flawed design from the top down
• the next problem was that Atkins had no idea how the body processes food as fuel
• it was impossible at this point to create an effective weight loss program

The First Major Blunder was Atkins Low-Carb “Induction Phase”

In the Induction Phase of Atkins’s low-carb plan, one reduces carbohydrates to about 20 grams per day. Why is this a major mistake?

Your body has two different enzyme systems for processing fuel: one for processing fat and one for processing carbohydrates. And, our bodies are very efficient and don’t keep things around that we’re not using: if you’re eating lots of carbohydrates, the enzymes that process them increase, and the ones that process fat decrease.

Most people eat between 200-300 grams of carbohydrate each day. When you drop from that to 20 grams using Atkins’s low-carb, you must burn fat for fuel. And there’s plenty around: fat on your body and now fat from your diet.

But, the enzymes for processing fat are in shutdown mode because there was no reason for your cells to keep them fully active because you were forcing the body to burn carbs just because of the vast number you were consuming.

Now, you go from plenty of fuel to almost none. The fat IS there but you just can’t process it.

What happens next gave the naysayers all the fire-power they needed to condemn the Atkins’s low-carb diet:

• nausea
• headaches
• excessive fatigue
• bad breath
• mental confusion
• lack of zest for living
• rapid ketosis develops (more on this later)
   

Atkins’s Low-Carb Induction Phase is Survived Only by the Hardiest Individuals

When I first did Atkins’s low-carb diet, many, many years ago, I promptly gained 5 pounds. You don’t tell a former football lineman that he can eat all the meat he wants because he’ll do it!

So, that’s how it plays out: some gain weight on Atkins’s low-carb plan, some (5-10%) lose lots of weight — more than 40 pounds — some lose 10-20 pounds, most (who do actually lose) lose 5-10 pounds and then hit the wall.

How did Atkins address weight loss plateaus? He had you cut your carbs by 5 gram increments until, in theory, you started to lose again. Rarely happened.

Of course, since carbs do not control weight and calories do, this plan could not possibly work. Few can tolerate living on less than 30 grams of carb per day.

Easy to give up on Atkins’s diet at that point.

Ketosis: Atkins’s Miracle for Slimness

When I did my PhD, I didn’t know much about ketones. If I had it would have made my work that much better.

I showed that exercising rats who had been administered estrogen switched to fat fuel as a source of energy, preferring it over carbohydrates. My work was published in the Journal of American Physiology. If I had known about ketones, I’m sure I would have found that they were the preferred fuel.

Ketones form during:

• starvation
• eating a low-carb diet
• with estrogen administration
• each condition lowers insulin which controls the release of fat from fat cells: low insulin, fat releases; increased insulin causes both fat and carbohydrates (converted to fat) to be stored in the fat cell

The production of ketones is one of the primary negatives of this diet as claimed by the medical Establishment.

• ketones were first discovered in the urine of diabetics
• that led the medical Establishment to believe ketosis was very bad
• but there’s physiological ketosis and pathological ketosis — one normal and one a disease
• using ketone sticks to test the urinary level is one way to determine ketosis

Ketones are a form of fat fuel. As the fat cell releases fat, it travels to the liver where it’s repackaged into a four carbon compound called a ketone body. This is released to the blood and becomes the primary fuel of all the tissues of the body including your brain and nerves.

(Atkins was unaware of much of this as I found out in 1989 when I was on his NY radio show as a guest. He took me to dinner and ate both his potato AND mine, sorta’ fell off the pedestal.)

Ketosis is a good thing because now you can begin to live off your own body fat and, MOST IMPORTANT, not experience hunger. So, ketosis is good.

How did Atkins mess it up? It takes time for your body to build up the enzymes to process ketones, at least 2-4 weeks. When they’re fully flowered, you start burning all the ketones for fuel and there are none left to spill over into your urine.

You can see now why the Atkins’s low-carb Induction Phase is such a disaster: can’t cut your carbs that hard without dys-regulating many processes. You can survive it, but it’s not easy, particularly when you have no idea what to expect (Atkins doesn’t tell his readers any of this).

So, when you quit losing weight, Atkins’s low-carb plan has you cut more carbs to get back into ketosis (ketones in the urine is how he measures it). But few will spill because they’re burning them as fuel. You cut carbs, as he says, but you’ll still stay stalled in your weight loss efforts.

What do you do? Quit the diet in utter frustation.

Atkins was right to try to create ketosis, but he just didn’t know how to do it correctly. The medical boys were wrong to claim ketosis was a bad thing. Be very careful when medical doctors try to do nutritional biochemistry.

Now that Atkins is Dead, What Happened to His Plan?

Since Atkins’s death the low-carb program has become very popular. And, most follow his plan. Those who took over his company actually published a new book using his plan in its entirety. They have no clue about its extensive flaws.

The other problem is that they have embraced the Glycemic Index or the “Good Carb/Bad Carb” philosophy, integrating it into the overall plan. So now, the diet goes from bad to worse.

Hey, I suffered through a five pound weight gain on Atkins’s low-carb when all I wanted to do was lose some weight.

It took several years for me to work out the issues, but when I finally understood the supremacy of calories and understood the dynamics of “regulation of metabolism” and issues related to enzyme function and adaptation, I was able to work out a plan based on how our body actually works.

Out the door went speculation and belief systems — I developed it based on hard science. My little 52-page book, The Low-Carb Diet: How to Do It Right is a comprehensive primer on doing this diet the right way.