When Dr Atkins died in 2003, his multi-million-dollar business evaporated. Then a leaked report suggested he was killed by his own creation. Ed Moloney reports 
Finally, it was a patch of ice, lurking unseen but deadly on a Manhattan sidewalk, that started the slump - that, and a mayor who couldn't keep his mouth shut, a careless New York City bureaucrat and a Florida-based millionaire with a blocked heart artery. From there, it was downhill all the way.
NI_MPU('middle');For years the medical profession had poured scorn on Dr Robert Atkins and his low-carb diet, while many of the corporate giants of America's food-processing and beer industries could only watch their profits plummet as millions of Americans followed his advice to swap flour-, starch- and sugar-based products for high-fat and protein-rich food. But, try as the critics might, the Atkins Diet phenomenon grew and grew, becoming the most extraordinarily popular food fad in post-war US history.
At its peak in 2004, nearly 30m Americans were hard-core disciples of Atkins's low-carb diet, or variations on it, while another 70m watched their carbohydrate intake carefully. In Britain, 3m people were devoted followers.
On average during this time, two new low- carb products appeared daily in US food stores, while fast-food, restaurant, supermarket and publishing businesses were all forced to adapt or die as the Atkins Diet spawned an industry worth some £17.2 billion annually. In Britain the boom in low-carb food products began in 2004 when the number on offer rose from 5 to 159, among them a "no-bread" sandwich sold by Pret A Manger, while high-volume chains like Boots and Safeway all jumped on board the Atkins bus and stocked ranges of goods from low-carb chocolate bars, bread and puddings to sauce mixes.
But that was then. In the past two years the Atkins Diet fad has faded in no less an extraordinary fashion than it arrived. The numbers on a strict low-carb regime in the US have plunged fivefold to some 6m and falling; unsold low-carb food products now stack the shelves of food banks in places like Appalachia for distribution to charities, while the empire founded by Dr Atkins has all but disintegrated, his New York clinic has closed down and the company that promoted his gospel and sold his food products forced into bankruptcy protection. In the UK the decline began later but was no less abrupt. Net sales by Boots and ICI, which makes the low-starch flour substitute used in Atkins-style foods, both dipped significantly last year, falls that were attributable to the fad ending.
Overweight America has not, however, lost all of its obsession with diets - and Atkins has left its mark. One of the most popular, the South Beach Diet, created by the Miami-based cardiologist Arthur Agatston, is seen as a healthier version of Atkins's formula. Former colleagues, like Fred Pescatore, who worked with him in the New York clinic, have produced their own versions. Pescatore's is the Hamptons Diet, named after the exclusive Long Island colony, and it claims to achieve "Atkins results, Hamptons style" with the help of macadamia nuts, a favourite snack food of the late Dr Atkins. However there are other signs, in the US and Britain, that Atkins's decline may have hit the dieting industry at large. When Unilever bought Slim-Fast Foods in 2000, it was valued at £1.3 billion. Slim-Fast was then hit by the Atkins fad, and when Atkins began to languish, the customers didn't return. Its value last August was put at under £300m.
All this was in the far, unthinkable future when Robert Atkins graduated from Cornell Medical College in 1955 and began practising as a cardiologist in New York. Born in Ohio in 1930, Atkins built a small but prosperous practice and had a comfortable if predictable future ahead. Two things changed it. One was America's growing concern at its burgeoning waistline; the other was Atkins's anxiety about his. Post-war prosperity, the abundance of cheap food and the growth of the fast-food industry were, by the early 1960s, combining to make Americans fatter - and increasingly concerned about it.
Human history is replete with examples of populations starving to death, but never of them eating themselves to death - yet this was beginning to happen in the US. The American obsession with dieting dates back to 1961, when a Brooklyn housewife called Jean Nidetch, who was seriously obese, began casting around for diets. She held meetings to discuss ways of losing weight, and within months people would queue on the street to attend them. In 1963 she formalised the idea and gave it the name Weight Watchers, a business that now has 44,000 employees and a turnover of £570m. In 1963, Robert Atkins was also concerned at his weight. He was 6ft tall, weighed 225lbs and had a big appetite. Nothing seemed to stop the pounds rolling on. Then he read an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association about a low-carbohydrate diet. A few weeks before his death 40 years later, he told one reporter: "I hadn't tried a diet before that. It was the only diet that looked like I'd enjoy being on."
The notion that cutting carbohydrate intake could reduce weight dates back to the mid-19th century when a London undertaker called William Banting cut back on carbs, lost 50lb and wrote about it. But it was new to Atkins and to most of America in the 1960s. He refined the diet he had read about and, encouraged by his own experience, transformed his cardiology practice into a diet clinic that over the years treated, by one estimate, 65,000 clients.
Whatever Atkins's first motives, it was an extremely shrewd business move. The obesity problem was growing in America, and his diet offered advantages that few others could: dieters could more or less eat anything as long as it was low in, or free of, carbohydrates. His clinic, where he and a growing band of devotees dispensed advice for generous fees, grew in popularity, and in 1972 he published his first book, Dr Atkins' Diet Revolution, which was a minor sensation and sold over 10m copies.
Atkins's ideas directly challenged the medical establishment. By the 1960s, around one in seven Americans were dangerously overweight, and as the search widened for a cure, the medical profession was in no doubt that fatty foods were to blame, and that they were also a cause of the cholesterol that leads to heart attacks.
Low-fat dieting soon became the orthodoxy of the medical world, US government and the diet industry. By the 1970s, official advice to overweight America from Washington, academia and a range of health groups like the American Heart Association was the same: cut down on fat and increase consumption of carbohydrates. In 1992 the US government published the "food pyramid", which recommended the best eating habits for Americans. At the base were carbohydrates like bread, rice and pasta, with advice that 6 to 11 servings should be eaten every day. Next came vegetables, followed by fruit, dairy, meat, fish, poultry, grains and eggs, all to be eaten between two and five times daily. At the top were fats, oils and sweets, which were to be eaten sparingly.
Atkins turned that pyramid on its head by arguing that fat was harmless and that people would best lose weight by eating steak, eggs, butter - but not rice, pasta, bread and sugar. Dieters could eat "truly luxurious foods without limit, lobster with butter sauce, steak with béarnaise sauce…", as long as they cut out starches and refined carbohydrates such as sugar and anything made from flour. Vegetables were allowed in small quantities; fruit juices and beer were out.
Atkins had a worked-out explanation for his diet, called "ketosis". He argued that obesity was a direct result of the body secreting too much insulin from eating too many carbs. This causes food cravings and lowers blood-sugar levels, causing people to eat more. When the body has too much insulin it burns off carbohydrates and stores excess calories as fat - hence the weight gain. But when insulin levels are lowered, fat is burned off as fuel and weight is lost. Reduce carbohydrate intake and the body will use its own fat for energy. Furthermore, fat sated the appetite, reducing the need to snack.
That was page one, there are two more pages here... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...4201_1,00.html 
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March 10th, 2006, 02:35 PM
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