The Atkins diet has been bandied back and forth for quite some time now but a lot of people have no idea about who Atkins really was.
The late Robert Coleman Atkins was a doctor, a cardiologist by specialty. He was born in October 17, 1930 and died on April 17, 2003. He became popular because of a diet he created which had some spectacular successes including Robert Atkins himself. His basis for the diet was a low starch model that appeared in a JAMA article regarding the work of Alfred Pennington. Aside from his own success with the diet, he repeated the same successful weight loss program with 65 patients of his who were overweight.
Because of this success, he attracted the attention of the media and initially appeared on the Tonight show in 1965 and then in 1970, an article in Vogue discussed his diet thus leading some people to call it the Vogue diet. Then in 1972, he released his book entitled Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution which sold copies in the millions.
His diet got a lot of welcome and unwelcome attention due to its controversial principle of allowing basically unrestricted consumption of protein and fat while limiting strictly carbohydrate intake. This restriction was premised on the belief of Atkins that carbohydrates were in fact the dietary villains. He stated that carbohydrates causes and overproduction of insulin by the body which leads to a condition called hyperinsulinism which metabolizes the glucose in the blood and creating a strong hunger sensation. In fact, it was the belief of Dr. Atkins that there was a close link between obesity and diabetes, even coining a term di-obesity which was, in fact, the title of the book he was preoccupied with at the time of his death.
After the release of his first book, he put up, in Manhattan, the Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine sometime in 1990s. It is said that he was able to treat over 50,000 patients there. This was followed by the creation in 1998 of Atkins Nutritionals which had the aim of promoting his low carb diet. Then in 1992, he released his book Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution which promptly became a bestselling title once again.
Several years later, in 2002, Robert Atkins suffered a heart attack, a condition which the American Heart Association quickly attributed to his diet. However Atkins contested this saying that the heart attack was a result of a chronic infection.
Then in April 2008, after a serious snowstorm hit New York, Dr. Atkins was walking to his office when he slipped on some ice and hit his head. This caused bleeding in his brain and after 9 days in a coma, Dr. Atkins passed away on April 17,2003.
To this day, there are many proponents of the Atkins diet and variants thereof. There have been some changes in order to make the saturated fat portion less alarming to conservative physicians but the diet itself is generally unchanged.
So who was Atkins? He was someone who challenged the norms of dieting and nutrition and came up with a program where the jury is still out regarding its efficacy.
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