Have you seen the advertisements for the "Atkins Food Guide Pyramid™"? It scares me to think that now this low-carbohydrate, high-fat, high-protein diet is trying to equate itself with a healthy diet. Previously, we all knew that following this type of diet was a way to lose weight. Losing weight can be viewed as healthy if a person's current weight is in the overfat or obese range, but the foods prescribed to be eaten as a means to this end never claimed to meet nutritional needs for vitamins, minerals, fiber, and phytonutrients; this is why vitamin and mineral supplements are, in fact, part of this nutritionally inadequate diet.

Being overweight or obese increases one's risk of diabetes, heart disease, strokes, osteoarthritis, and certain cancers-losing even 10% of your body weight can help to lower these risks. There are hundreds of different diets that can help you lose weight and they all boil down to one similarity: calorie restriction. Even Atkins is a calorie-restricted diet since, when you cut out one or two food groups, you're bound to cut calories, too. It's easy to lose weight on a diet, but the harder part is maintaining your weight loss. Dr. Atkins predicts that you will most likely gain weight in the last phase of his diet and, once you've inched up by five pounds, you need to start over with the Induction phase, which has a 20-gram carbohydrate limit (the amount of carbohydrates in 2 cup of black beans). That means that you'll be on the diet for the rest of your life! Are you ready to give up cereal and carrots forever?

I guess you don't really have to give up cereal or bread now that you can buy low-carb versions of processed foods like doughnuts, bagels, and ice cream, to name a few. But therein lies the potential downfall of Atkins's success: People were losing lots of weight when they followed the original instructions to (1) cut out processed foods that were high in sugars and refined carbohydrates and (2) add in more vegetables. That was the aspect of Atkins that I supported. Now that there are low-carb versions of all the junk food, however, people have basically switched from eating the regular or low-fat forms of muffins and other foods to eating the low-carb versions, which tend to have the equivalent number of calories as the other varieties. As a result, weight loss is tapering off for those on the diet. This situation is starting to resemble the downfall of the fat-free craze when people ate fat-free cookies by the box instead of more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Even Atkins Nutritionals, Inc. is reminding people in their latest advertisements that "you do not need packaged products to do Atkins correctly…"

Nutritional scientists from Tufts University were curious to find out whether you could take a healthful approach to following the Atkins diet. They devised nutritionally-focused sample menus based on the instructions in the book, analyzed them, and found that it was impossible to meet the Daily Values for 11 nutrients. Additionally, each of the phases had two to three times the daily upper limit for saturated fat and cholesterol. Nutrients are essential for enabling our immune systems to fight off heart disease, cancers, and diabetes; there is plenty of scientific evidence that diets high in saturated fat, trans fats, and cholesterol increase the risk for these diseases. Although there have been studies that show that people on high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets lose weight and lower their LDL cholesterol and blood pressure, any basic nutrition textbook will tell you that losing weight by most any means will accomplish these same reductions.

Now, Atkins Nutritionals, Inc. has gone all the way to Washington to propose a controlled-carbohydrate food guide pyramid to the USDA, the agency responsible for establishing nutritional guidelines and the Food Guide Pyramid (FGP). Many people believe that the current FGP needs to be redesigned since nearly two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese. However, less than 12% of the population even comes close to eating according to the FGP and they're not necessarily the overweight and obese contingency. Having a private food company involved in the redesign of government-issued health guidelines is a conflict of interest and an opportunity to have a private interest represented as governmental health policy. Think about the possible implications on your own health and the health of our entire nation if we start to think of bacon as a health food and watermelon as a junk food.