Atkins is turning into 'The Zone'

The popular Atkins diet is undergoing a big change, moving towards a low-glycemic 'Zone-style' eating plan. Definitely a good idea...

From Newsday.com:

With hardly any fanfare, the people who control the Atkins diet have suddenly abandoned their famous meat-gorging, bread-shunning eating plan.

"Never mind!" they're telling a whole generation of Atkins meatheads.

Instead of Atkins' familiar "net carbs" system for measuring food, they've introduced an Atkins "glycemic index," an approach that seeks to gauge the body's blood-sugar response to food.

Diet irony alert: This glycemic index sounds awfully like the weight-loss plan popularized by one of Atkins' chief competitors, the Zone diet. Robert Atkins and "The Zone" author Dr. Barry Sears clashed frequently at medical conferences and in media interviews, scoffing at each other's philosophies. Now, it seems, the Atkins people are all but embracing the Zone, while back at company headquarters in Ronkonkoma, they try to spin the change as no big deal.

"We see this as the standard and the next generation for measuring net carb and blood sugar impact," Matthew Wiant, Atkins' chief marketing officer, told Reuters this week.

So what spurred the change?

Simple. The low-carb fad had passed.

Sales of Atkins frozen dinners and Atkins power bars were slipping. And it certainly didn't help that Atkins died on April 17, 2003, after a fall on an icy sidewalk. At death, he was 72 years old, 6 feet tall and 258 pounds. After a lifetime of dieting, he qualified as officially obese.

One person watching all this with special fascination is "Zone" author Sears. Was that the sound of sweet vindication in his voice?

"I knew Bob very well," Sears said yesterday from a medical conference in San Diego. "I debated him for years. He thought carbohydrates were evil, and we had to take them out of our diets entirely. That spawned a whole frenzy for the low-carb approach."

Read the rest...

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