such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Moreover, high insulin levels have been associated with a higher incidence of diabetes.( Since Type II diabetics also have high insulin levels, the two epidemics, obesity and diabetes, can quite properly be considered a single epidemic.)
• The metabolic effect resulting from excess insulin production can be circumvented by controlling carbohydrates. When you control your intake of refined carbohydrates, you avoid the foods that cause you to be fat.
• This metabolic correction is so striking that some of you will be able to lose weight eating a higher number of calories than you ' ve been eating on diets top-heavy in carbohydrates.
• Diets high in carbohydrates are precisely what most overweight people don ' t need and can ' t become permanently slim on. Low-fat diets are, by their very nature, almost always high-carbohydrate diets and bring on the very problems that they were intended to protect us from.
• Our epidemics of diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure are very largely the results of our overconsumption of refined carbohydrates and its connection to hyperinsulinism.
• The Atkins Nutritional Approach can and has corrected these serious risk factors associated with obesity.
There has been sufficient evidence to make these assertions for more than thirty years now. But the heavy hand of government and such prominent organizations as the United States Department of Agriculture blanketed the nation with messages about low-fat dieting from the 1970s to the present. In fact, U. S. government statistics for this time period clearly demonstrate that along with the dramatic decrease in dietary fat intake( from forty percent to thirty-three percent of our caloric intake) there was also a dramatic increase in the intake of refined carbohydrates, not only sugar but white flour. There is no doubt in my mind that this increase in refined carbohydrates has been spurred by the media attention given to the Food Guide Pyramid, created by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, which made six to eleven daily servings of these wheat derivatives the basis of the pyramid. I believe that the Food Guide Pyramid ' s recommendations have directly contributed to the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes we now face in this country.
There are many examples in history of things we ' ve thought were true that we eventually realized were wrong. Remember, we once were sure the earth was flat. But we learn, make progress and can correct our missteps. Only during the last few years has a significant percentage of Americans begun to question what we ' ve been taught about how to eat.
And in just the last year or two, the news media has finally begun reporting the range of scientific studies showing that low-fat / high-carbohydrate diets lead to high levels of insulin and to the number-one risk factor for heart disease, high triglycerides. These studies also reveal that controlled carbohydrate diets reverse these problems in a very large percentage of the population. Many of these important studies are referenced throughout this book.
If you ' ve been overweight for very long, it ' s almost certain you have a blood sugar or a metabolic disorder. This means that refined carbohydrates-which include sugars, white flour products and junk foods that are such a whopping proportion of the American diet-are slow poison to you. Those foods are bad for your health, bad for your energy level, bad for your mental state, bad for your figure. Bad for your career prospects, bad for your sex life, bad for
17