What About Atkins?

Recently, many people have turned to the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet to lose weight. What most people don’t understand is that, while eating a high-protein, animal-based diet might help them shed unwanted pounds for a short time, those pounds will come back with a vengeance. People who go on the Atkins diet often end up fatter than when they started and experience additional health problems, including kidney and liver trouble.

James Anderson, M.D., professor of medicine and clinical nutrition at the University of Kentucky’s School of Medicine, explains that the Atkins diet “is absolutely the worst diet you could imagine for long-term obesity, heart disease, and some forms of cancer. If you wanted to find one diet to ruin your health, you couldn’t find one worse than Atkins.”

Dr. Dean Ornish advocates a vegan diet as the most effective way to lose weight and keep it off. He points out that “none of the high-protein diet authors ha[s] ever published any studies in any peer-reviewed journals documenting that their approach can help people lose weight safely and keep it off. In contrast, my colleagues and I at the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute have published our findings in the leading peer-reviewed medical journals.”

The Atkins diet is also associated with an array of other health problems, which is why it has been denounced by so many members of the medical establishment. See, for example, the commentaries offered by the following doctors and organizations:

• The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
• Dr. John McDougall
• Dr. Dean Ornish
• Dr. Michael Greger
• The American Heart Association

Have you experienced problems with the Atkins diet? If so, click here.

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