The Cholesterol Myth
Eating fatty foods raises cholesterol to dangerous levels, endangering cardiovascular health, right? Not necessarily. Let’s take this step by step: What is cholesterol? Like fats, cholesterol is a lipid, and like them, it’s essential for life. How so? Cholesterol, along with fats, is essential for normal cellular function, hormone production, and infection fighting. How is Read More
Shifting From Carbohydrate to Fat for Exercise
Summary: The following information was written by Atkins professionals. The purpose of this study was to assess metabolic adaptations to a high-fat diet in endurance cyclists. Sixteen endurance-trained cyclists were randomly assigned to one of two diet groups for a period of 15 days. One group remained on their habitual diet (30% of calories from Read More
Men’s Health Magazine Gets it Right
Recently, as readers of this newsletter know, award winning science reporter Gary Taubes published a best-selling book that questioned the wisdom of low-fat diets and backed up every claim with copious research (over 100 pages worth of footnotes and references). Now a popular magazine has followed suit. The generally excellent Men’s Health magazine has published Read More
Low-Fat Diets Don’t Deliver on Heart Health
Unless you’re living on another planet, you’ve heard this message: reduce your intake of fat and cholesterol to achieve a healthy weight and decrease the likelihood of developing heart disease. In fact, the terms “healthy” and “low fat” seem inextricably linked. But now we know that the rationale for a low-fat diet is based on Read More
Lack of Omega 3’s may Play a Role in Aggressive Behavior
Omega-3 fats are selectively concentrated in the brain, which may be why your mother– correctly, as it turns out–told you that fish was “brain food.” And now new research is demonstrating that both depressive and aggressive disorders can be exacerbated by deficiencies in omega-3 fatty acid intake. Joseph Hibbeln, MD and his team at the Read More
Avoiding Trans-Fats When Eating Out
Most readers of this site now understand how to avoid trans-fats: read the label and be on the lookout for “partially hydrogenated oil”. If “partially hydrogenated oil” is in the ingredients, the food contains trans-fats. But how do you avoid trans-fats while eating out, when the ingredient list is almost never available? One sure way Read More
Atkins Position on Saturated Fat
“The thirty-year-long campaign against dietary fat is as misguided as it is futile”. That statement, written in The New Diet Revolution by Dr. Robert Atkins, is now being vindicated with startling regularity as new research continues to show. There’s good reason to believe that even mainstream researchers have come to realize that the demonization of Read More
Ask the Nutritionist: Saturated fat facts
Q: My doctor told me I shouldn’t do Atkins because it contains more saturated fat than is currently recommended. What is the real scoop? A: Within the context of a low-carb diet, research has shown that saturated fat is not harmful. In one study, researchers explored what happens to saturated fat levels in subjects who Read More
Analysis of Fat Content in Atkins Diet
Meticulous analysis of the daily food menus for the three principle phases of the Atkins Nutritional Approach reveals a very balanced intake of fats. This happens naturally with whole food selections because nature, in its wisdom, presents fats in whole foods in such a manner. Many, many studies have been done in the past several Read More
Q&A with Nina Teicholz, New York Times Bestselling Author – THE BIG FAT SURPRISE
What inspired you to write this book? I was intrigued by a mystery: in the early 2000s, I had a side job reviewing restaurants for a small neighborhood newspaper that didn’t have the budget to pay for meals, so I had to accept whatever the chef decided to send out to me. This turned out Read More