Free Living Low Carb by Jonny Bowden

combination of the interventions. It is entirely possible that Ornish would have gotten the same or better results with a program of exercise, stress management, smoking cessation, and group therapy plus a wholefoods diet of high protein, good fats, high fiber, and low sugar. (Interestingly, critics of low-carb diets frequently proclaim with great righteousness that the only reason a low-carb diet works is because it is a low-calorie diet in disguise. They never level that criticism at Ornish, whose diet, in a recent analysis, turned out to be lower in calories [1,273 calories] than the Atkins ongoing weight-loss phase [1,627 calories], the Atkins maintenance phase [1,990 calories], the Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet [1,476 calories], Sugar Busters! [1,521 calories], the Zone [approximately 1,500 calories], and even Weight Watchers [1,462 calories].) 37
    The Tide Turns: A Reexamination of the Low-Carb Solution
    By the 1990s, it was pretty obvious that low-fat dieting wasn’t getting results. The country was fatter than ever, diabetes was becoming epidemic, and people were getting more and more frustrated and confused. The time was right for another look at the low-carb wisdom that had been around in one form or another since Banting’s day in the 1800s. To the chagrin of the medical establishment and the American Dietetic Association, Atkins resurfaced with a vengeance with his newly updated New Diet Revolution in 1992, followed by perhaps the most influential nutrition book of the 1990s, Barry Sears’s The Zone, in 1995, a year that also saw the publication of the brilliant Protein Power by Drs. Michael R. and Mary Dan Eades.
    After massive resistance by the establishment, serious research was finally comparing low-carb diets to traditional diets, and the results were impressive. While it would be incorrect to say that low-carb diets always produced greater weight loss than the traditional kind, they often did; they frequently produced it faster (a huge motivating force for many people); and they almost always produced better health outcomes such as bloodlipid profiles, precisely the measures that the anti–low-carb forces had predicted would be disastrous on these regimens (see chapter 2 ). In what will probably turn out to be a signal event in the death of the high-carb dictatorship, Dr. Walter Willett—chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and one of the most respected mainstream researchers in the country—recently came out publicly against the 1992 USDA Food Guide Pyramid, which for a decade had promoted 6 to 11 servings a day of grains, breads, and pastas. 38
    Internecine battles among advocates of different diets were hardly something new. What was different this time was that the arguments were finally taken public. On February 24, 2000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture hosted a major symposium, “The Great Nutrition Debate,” which featured, among others, Dr. Robert Atkins (the Atkins diet), Dr. Barry Sears (the Zone diet), low-fat advocates Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. John McDougall, and various representatives of the dietary establishment. 39 Then, on July 7, 2002, The New York Times published a cover story in its Sunday magazine section titled “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” in which Gary Taubes, a brilliant science journalist and three-time winner of the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award, brought to the table massive evidence that the low-fat diet had been the dumbest experiment in dietary history. The article created a predictable uproar, with defenders of the faith rallying to discredit Taubes—not an easy task, I might add—and the low-carbers beaming ear to ear with I-told-you-so grins.
    An interesting side note: on the Dietitian Central Web site (a dietitian Internet community), the following post was found on July 14, a week after the Taubes article appeared: “Please, dietitians, download from the NY