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Turns out most mainstream doctors and professional dietitians. They're attacking these latest fad diets on CNN and making Leeza seem like the McLaughlin Group. Last week 9,000 of them met in Atlanta for a conference of the American Dietetic Association, and even though the organization hadn't scheduled any Atkins talk for its seminars, it blasted low-carb diets as "a nightmare." JoAnn Hattner, a clinical nutritionist at the UCSF Stanford University Medical Center who attended the conference, worries about the high levels of protein and fat in many of these diets, as well as their lack of fiber. "Removing fiber causes constipation, fluid dehydration, weakness and nausea. It's a great strain on the kidneys," she says. Keith Ayoob, a professor of nutrition at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, warns about other "very unpleasant side effects--sometimes really bad breath."
But millions of people are willing to risk halitosis, or worse long-range health effects, to get rid of their obesity. The U.S. is by far the fattest country in the world, with 54% of the population overweight. If Americans didn't travel overseas, they'd think 200 lbs. was normal. They eat 7% more calories than they did 20 years ago. Even the nation's children, the ones so hyperactive they need Ritalin, are pudgy; 25% of them are overweight. To combat this, Americans, in lieu of exercise, spend $33 billion a year on the diet industry.
Carb paranoia struck when people discovered that all the fat-free food they loaded up on during the last diet craze was making them fat. Diet plans like the Pritikin Program of the early '80s and Susan Powter's Stop the Insanity! in 1993 caused a run on processed low-fat food like SnackWell's and frozen yogurt. But those treats, it turned out, were chock-full of sugar and a whole mess of calories. Result: you gained weight. The reaction in recent years has been to eliminate sugar by dropping carbohydrates from the menu altogether. So instead of the 1994 book Butter Busters, we now have Sugar Busters! and a series of the most guy-embraced diets ever, regimens with Henry VIII as a role model and beef jerky as a food group.
The science behind these diets is less intuitive than the old fat-makes-you-fat theory and therefore easier to argue over. Each of the low-carb diets is a variation on the theme that cutting down on carbohydrates and thus decreasing blood-sugar levels will cause the pancreas to produce less of the energy catalyst insulin. With less insulin to draw on, the body is forced to burn fat reserves for energy, thus leading to a quick weight loss. Opponents argue that cause and effect have been reversed: excess insulin is caused not by too many carbs but by being too fat. The reason people lose weight on low-carb diets, they say, is simply that by cutting out carbs, these dieters are reducing their calorie intake. In response, Atkins throws out scientific terms like ketones (fat-burning by-products), while The Zone author Barry Sears talks about eicosanoids, which he claims are all-powerful hormones. Opponents use words like charlatan.