By Johanna C. Scully
Some people see chocolate chip cookies everywhere, while others crave cold, juicy fruits like strawberries and honeydew melon. But these symptoms of the Atkins diet are at the very bottom of the health problems pile. Just think about this: what diet that virtually eliminates fruits and some vegetables could possibly be good for you?
Today, the United States is the most overweight and obese country in the world, with over 60 percent of the population overweight and of these, one-third are obese. Everywhere you turn, a new diet book is blinding you with some new gimmick and although we truly desire to lose fat, we still buy into these fads. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that poor diet and lack of exercise resulted in 400,000 deaths in 2000 and obesity is the second cause of preventable death behind smoking.
And yet Americans continue to gain weight. Why is this? Because we never learn how to eat healthy, we just learn how to follow fad diet after fad diet. If we want to seriously lose pure body-fat, we need to adopt healthy lifestyles. Instead of buying another diet book and joining another weight loss program, why don’t we focus on fighting cancer? Really, who wants to count calories or points or grams of saturated fat every day for the rest of our lives? We need to learn what foods are the best to “rev up” our body’s metabolic machines and to build up our immune systems. The answer to overall health and wellness is fruits and vegetables.
On the Atkins diet, the first two weeks are limited to 20 grams of carbohydrates a day. There is no fruit, no grains, no sugar and only two cups of romaine lettuce allowed. Free foods are meat, butter, oils, diet sodas and spices. Cheese, eggs and sugar substitutes are allowed in small quantities since each of these have a small amount of carbs per serving. (A one ounce cube of cheese has one or two carbohydrates depending on the type of cheese, an egg has one carb, a packet of Sweet & Low has one carb and half of a cup of whole milk cottage cheese has five carbs.) Milk is forbidden because it has 13 grams of carbohydrates per eight-ounce serving.
Richard Torrani, 22, a senior management major, said, “Carbohydrates are our main energy source. It doesn’t sound logical to cut them out. Why don’t people just eat less at every meal and stop endlessly snacking in between [meals]. No other country eats like we do.”
Besides being difficult to stick to, the Atkins diet barely provides any vitamins and minerals, no fiber, too much saturated fat and too much protein. Although some studies show that dieters’ triglyceride counts can sharply decrease in a short time period on the diet, there haven’t been enough human studies done outside of the Atkins regime to prove that the benefits outweigh the risks.
Dr. John Amdur, nutritionist and chiropractor and a professor of Human Nutrition at the University, said, “There is too much room for danger in this diet. The high protein/very low carbohydrate diet has been extensively tested on rats and the outcome was severe kidney disease. So much protein can cause kidney stones and kidney damage in humans as well.”
He added that most people don’t do the diet correctly because they haven’t read the book. The induction phase is only supposed to last two weeks and then you can gradually add in berries and nuts. But people tend to stay on the induction phase (20 carbs a day) for months or years. This high amount of protein and fat leads to high blood pressure and heart disease not to mention constipation due to lack of fiber, which leads to colon cancer.
The diet appeals to many people because it is easy to follow, you can eat a lot of food and people enjoy the taste of fat. The more fat one consumes, the more is craved. But when you don’t eat any carbohydrates, which includes fruits, vegetables, grains and starches, you increase your chances of developing Ketosis. Burning fat lets off natural by-products called ketones. In the Atkins diet, the body is using mainly fat as an energy source so the number of ketones in the body skyrockets. This leads to an increase in uric acid while it raises the risk of gout and kidney stones as well as depletes the body’s mineral stores. In mild elevations of ketones, one can experience nausea, fatigue and loss of muscle mass, while in serious ketone overload you can slip into a coma and possibly die. Now does this sound like the perfect diet?
You can lose weight on Atkins, but a lot of the weight is water. When you do start to burn fat you are also burning the protein in your muscles. And when you start eating carbohydrates again, even fruits, you will gain the weight back and maybe more. The reason why people lose weight on Atkins is because they are eating less calories.
“We are omnivores. We were meant to eat plant products. Just look at our teeth. If we were exclusive meat eaters, all of our teeth would be razor sharp. We have molars with deep grooves which are used for chomping up plants,” Amdur said.
Another problem with Atkins is the safety of all of the meat products eaten. Animals today are injected with growth and other hormones and are treated with antibiotics, but nobody seems concerned about this.
“We wonder why everyone is getting taller these days and why girls are getting their menstrual cycles at age 10 or 11. These hormones are damaging our natural growth, causing cancer and the antibiotics used in the meat are decreasing the effectiveness of medicines,” Amdur said.
Probably the most destructive aspect of Atkins is the fact that the brain only runs on glucose or sugar. When people are only ingesting protein and fat for a long period of time, the brain can become severely damaged. The lack of glucose to the brain can cause coma, shock and brain damage within two years on the diet, although most people don’t last this long.
George Pareja, a 19-year-old sophomore marketing major, said, “If I only had 20 [grams of] carbohydrates a day I wouldn’t be able to sit through three classes. Anything in excess is bad and too little of anything is bad. You need balance. And I especially need sugar because I play sports. Atkins is so unreasonable for college students.”
Instead of buying into these dangerous, good-on-paper diets, people should be committed to overall health and fitness. Amdur tells all of his patients to stop dieting, throw away their scales and eat a salad before lunch and dinner.
“Eat a tremendous amount of fruits and vegetables,” Amdur said. “Citrus fruits prevent cancer with vitamin C, broccoli has fiber which prevents colon cancer, sweet potatoes are filled with vitamins and tomatoes fight blindness, prostate and colon cancer.”
The government is now recommending 9 to 13 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, which is a far cry from the 3 to 5 servings portrayed on the old food pyramid. So, when you enter the Student Center just head right for the fruits and vegetables. Don’t even bother looking at the Danishes and sugary pretzels. And be cautious of diets that substitute cancer fighting foods such as fruits and vegetables with cancer causing foods like diet sodas and synthetic sugars. If you do eat a lot of protein, or even if you don’t, the key is to drink a ton of water because dehydration often triggers hunger.
Amdur’s advice is to eat lean cuts of meat like chicken breast and pork, and to add in non-animal protein such as soy, tofu and nuts. When in doubt about your new lifestyle changes just think about this: no-one ever got fat from eating too many fruits and vegetables.