Atkins and Breakfast Items

There’s been much talk lately about low-carb/high-protein diets — such as the “Atkin’s Diet” — spurned on by an article in the NY Times.

In the strict Atkins formula, dieters can have as much fat as they want. And, that can lead to some absurd situations, such as a burst in the sales of pork-rinds as a diet food (I’m not kidding) because of their high-protein/low-carb makeup.

At any rate, the author of that NY Times article says that the low-fat philosophy currently popular may not be perfect (in fact, he disagrees with much of the current low-fat teachings).

Incidentally, that link to the NY Times’ website requires you to register at the site to read the article. So, if you'd rather not deal with that, the article is also available without registration here.

That type of diet not exactly what I’m going with for my eating habits, as I’m trying to stay with low-fat (especially low saturated-fat) in addition to the low-carbs and “increased” protein.

I try to live healthily, but sometimes I'm just not sure what to believe. This follow-up article on CNN was helpful, though. There, they called three of the researchers who were quoted in the article:

These are three folks, all of them at Harvard. And we said: "Do you really think Dr. Atkins is right? Do you really suggest that your patients eat this pork chop with butter on top?"

And they all said: “Oh, no. We do not suggest that to our patients.” They said: “What we think is that maybe Atkins is on to something when he says fat is not that bad. But” — and here is the big but — “but we tell our patients to eat ‘good fats.’ We don’t tell them to eat butter. We don’t tell them to eat whole-fat milk, and we don’t tell them to eat cheeseburgers, which is what Dr. Atkins suggests. We tell them to eat fish. We tell them to eat nuts. We tell them to eat olive oil.” [...]

In addition to the discussion on Slashdot, there was also a story on Plastic about the NY Times article. My favorite part was probably this post about odd breakfast items. Some people think it’s odd that I have a tuna sandwich for breakfast (and lunch), so I could relate to some of the points in the post:

For the last three weeks or so, I’ve been eating hamburgers for breakfast. (If you think that’s disgusting, my friend eats something he affectionately named “waffle burgers.” [emphasis mine]) Get up, make a big-ass hamburger, take a half-hour to let the after-hamburger doldrums wear off, and that sets me up right for the rest of the day. [...]

I’ll be interested to see how current medical studies of the Atkins Diet turn out.