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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Tuesday, August 2, 2005

Low-carb diet bust bankrupts Atkins

By Margaret Webb Pressler
Washington Post

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At its peak, the Atkins plan was more than a diet; it was a lifestyle. Lured by the prospect of getting skinny while eating steak, Americans turned low-carb eating into the latest runaway diet craze.

But in the end, it was exactly that success that doomed Atkins to a fate like so many other get-thin-quick schemes that have come and gone, such as Scarsdale, Beverly Hills, Pritikin and The Zone.

As Atkins became a cultural phenomenon, hundreds of companies, large and small, swept in to capitalize on the program's huge popularity. They created and marketed far more low-carb products than there were dieters to eat them, including mass-market-style versions of pasta, cakes, cookies, bagels and many other foods that had been forbidden on a strict low-carb diet. Made with sugar substitutes and offering new concepts such as "net carbs," this new, $3 billion-a-year industry was aimed squarely at the age-old pursuit of getting thin while eating whatever you want, which, of course, never works.

Among the biggest promoters was Atkins Nutritionals Inc., founded by Dr. Robert C. Atkins, widely recognized for popularizing the movement with his best-selling books. The company filed for bankruptcy protection Sunday.

"They made the mistake of thinking that this was the one time that there would be a profound and permanent change in American dietary habits," said Adam Hanft, a brand and marketing consultant and author of the trend-spotting book "Dictionary of the Future."

Some diet experts and nutritionists had protested that the low-carb fad would pass, but manufacturers wouldn't listen. They were persuaded by the low-carb pitch that carbohydrates are bad because, when digested, they turn into sugar and are stored as fat. Retailers offering nothing but low-carb products expanded furiously.

"The reality is, the people that were buying low-carb when it went way up, when this bubble was inflating, were not following an Atkins, ketogenic diet," said Alan Beyda, chief executive of J.A.M.B. Business Enterprises Inc. of Pompano Beach, Fla., a national distributor of low-carb and sugar-free foods. The true Atkins dieter, he said, had to eat less than 20 grams of carbohydrates a day to lose weight, but people increasingly bent those rules as the indulgent products proliferated.

When the diet stopped working, people stopped buying the products. It's exactly what happened in the 1980s when low-fat diets were all the rage, and Snackwell's introduced low-fat cookies. People ate whole boxes of cookies and then moaned that low-fat diets don't work.