Let go from his job as a hotel manager last summer, Brad Saltzman had begun to panic by fall. Sure, his bank account was evaporating. But equally upsetting, he says, was that he was seeking too much comfort in the kitchen and was busting out of his belt. Physically and fiscally, Saltzman, 36, was a mess. Then he hit upon a cure-all: low carbs. Saltzman went on the Atkins diet at about the same time he helped launch Pure Foods, a specialty retailer based in Beverly Hills, Calif., that sells only products with comparatively few carbohydrates. Today Saltzman is 25 lbs. lighter, and his wallet is weighty. He has 24 employees, up from just four when he started, and will have 40 full-timers by June. "It was a eureka moment for me," Saltzman says of his carb-counting catharsis in October. "I needed to lose weight, and I needed a job in the next 30 days or--all kidding aside--I'd have had to move in with my grandmother." Instead, he's college-trim and planning a chain of stores and low-carb cafes and vending machines that he believes will ring up $100 million in sales annually within five years.
Critics of the carb counters' revolution may scoff at Saltz-man's enthusiasm, believing that Atkins, South Beach, Zone and other protein-packed eating regimens are part of a fad that will soon run its course, like low-fat diets in the 1980s. But they can't deny his weight loss or that of countless others who have dropped 20 or 50 or 100 lbs. after cutting carbs from their meals. Exactly why all those pounds melt away when we give up potatoes and bread remains something of a mystery to the dieting public. Is it mostly the temporary loss of water weight? Do low-carb fanatics lose weight while consuming more calories, as a Harvard study suggests, or do they end up eating less because they simply get bored with the high-protein life? Or is there some sort of metabolic magic when steak, eggs and cheese replace the starches in our diet? The late Dr. Robert Atkins, who got the ball rolling in 1972, controversially ascribed the weight loss to ketosis, the fat-burning state a body reaches when deprived of carbs. His critics have bordered on fanatic, their stridency growing in proportion to the diet's increase in popularity.
Many Americans figure they will let the nutritionists hash all this out--and take all the time you please, thank you. In the meantime, as Saltzman discovered, there are pounds to drop and profits to crop. It seems as if everyone is giving the low-carb culture a whirl. Whoopi Goldberg does it. So do Jennifer Aniston and Bill Clinton. What's good enough for the stars is, of course, appealing to the rest of us. Some 26 million Americans are on a hard-core low-carb diet right now. And 70 million more limit their carb intake without formally dieting, according to a new poll by Opinion Dynamics Corp.