[thechat] Fried Twinkies.

Martin Burns martin at easyweb.co.uk
Tue Oct 15 15:35:00 CDT 2002


On Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 08:35  pm, Madhu Menon wrote:

>> At least with Atkins, "lifetime" need not last very long.
>
> Atkins is a total scam. I'm surprised so many people still believe in
> it.

Um because I've lost 14 pounds in the last month without feeling hungry
once? And no, it wasn't a water loss sudden drop in the 1st week - it's
a consistent decline.

> Try lifting heavy weights in the gym without any carbohydrates for
> energy. Bah!

Sorry, the 'lifting heavy weights' bit got missed out of my copy. Could
you point out the page number or URL? Oh I forgot, you're reading a
'fitness expert' who believes that resistance training is the acme, yet
isn't medically qualified, or able to read respected journals such as
the Lancet.

Part of the point is that of *course* if you're exercising then if you
don't have energy to come from your recent food intake, it's going to
come from fat reserves.

> Carbs don't make you fat. EXCESS carbs make you fat.

Yes, and that's the basis of Atkins. Unfortunately, diets in nearly
every industrialised countries are excessive carbohydrate diets, and
it's hard to reduce slowly as your insulin levels are screaming at you
to eat more carbohydrate. So to get you back to the point where your
insulin levels are normalised, you eat an unbalanced diet to get you
there.

The maintenance stage of Atkins is entirely based on non-excess carbs
(rather than just severely reduced levels)

> You need a mild calorie deficit for fat loss. If you start starving, you
> will just slow your metabolism, making you fatter in the process.

Nope, I'm getting slimmer, I have more energy, and I'm not hungry.

> And I think there's enough research linking saturated fat to heart
> problems.

Funny, said research doesn't explain the heart disease rates of France -
the country with a high-fat diet, but the lowest incidence of heart
disease in the industrialised world. And you know better than to confuse
correlation with causual link.

> I'd go on and on, but fortunately this bloke has saved me the trouble of
> debunking Atkins:
> http://www.philkaplan.com/thefitnesstruth/atkins1.htm

If that's debunking then he isn't very good at it.

Did you (or he) actually read Atkins, or just the out of context quotes
fed from somewhere else? Did you or he read (or indeed attempt to find)
any research which contradicts Kaplan (who by the way comes over all
righteous about Atkins selling stuff for his diet when Kaplan does the
same thing - way to be hypocritical, Phil), because obviously Phil
didn't bother thinking and challenging anything the AMA told him.

Obviously he doesn't read The Lancet (peer reviewed to the hilt), or the
Annals of Internal Medicine, or the American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition, or Verhandlung Der Deutschen Gesellshaft fur Innere Medizin -
studies such as Kekwick and Pawan (who included water balance factors to
exclude the effect of water loss), or Pennington, or Benoit, or Krehl,
or Young, or Rabast.

Come on, Madhu, bring on a *real* scientist if you're going to play
debunking.

Cheers
Martin
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