I don’t know if you’ve noticed it yet or not, but there appears to be a major paradigm shift in reporting happening regarding low-carb diets in some of the most prestigious media publications over the past few years. We’ve seen it in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, The Huffington Post, UK Daily Mail, and People, for example, and the trend is a positive one for the high-fat, low-carb cause. However, over that same time period there has been one media outlet in particular that has been especially critical of an Atkins-styled low-carb diet plan–I’m referring to Consumer Reports.
I first reported in May 2005 shortly after starting this blog about how the benefits of livin’ la vida low-carb were severely skewed by Consumer Reports because they said it was a great “short-term weight loss” program but failed to help participants retain their weight loss. They even said it provided poor nutrition for allowing too much fat and saturated fat, too few fruits, too little fiber and that it “might have a negative effect on some dieters’ health.” Just two years later, they were back at it again when I blogged about it in 2007 when Consumer Reports again treated the Atkins diet unfairly because they were basing their opinions about it completely on the current Dietary Guidelines at the time that eschewed fat, especially saturated fat, and embraced whole grains and starchy carbs. So of course the Atkins diet isn’t gonna look good through the lens of a severely skewed and outdated nutritional analysis.
Flash forward to 2011 and it seems that even Consumer Reports is singing a different tune. While they still rank plenty of other diets like Jenny Craig, Slim-Fast, Weight Watchers and Zone ahead of the Atkins diet (see the full three-page published article in the June 2011 issue of Consumer Reports here, here and here), the low-carb diet actually got a special mention in the post-commentary that seemed rather odd given its unenthusiastic rating. They even went so far as to proclaim in the heading of this section that “It’s OK to go low-carb.” Well, thanks for your permission. Check it out for yourself:
Most striking to me was the fact they admit that while the Atkins diet performed poorly when using the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans as the basis for coming up with the ratings, there’s actually “more to the story” because of the “evidence (that) is accumulating that refined carbohydrates promoted weight gain and type 2 diabetes through their effects on blood sugar and insulin.” Well HALLELUJAH! They quoted Duke low-carb researcher and practitioner Dr. Eric Westman who explains why controlling carbohydrates is so essential to weight and health management.
I was so pleased to read Consumer Reports acknowledging the research of people like Dr. Ronald Krauss who found in 2010 that saturated fat is probably not the enemy we’ve been led to believe it is. They wrote “it’s clear that fat is not the all-around villain we’ve been taught it is” and that the unintended consequences of making people fat-phobic is the fact they are now eating more carbohydrates like white bread and potatoes instead. Harvard nutrition researcher Dr. Frank Hu also chimed in on this subject stating that “refined carbohydrates are likely to cause even greater metabolic damage than saturated fat.” AMAZING! The best part of the reporting by Consumer Reports on the low-carb diet is their acknowledgment that “clinical studies have found that an Atkins or Atkins-like diet not only doesn’t increase heart-disease risk factors but also actually reduces them as much as or more than low-fat, higher-carb diets that produce equivalent weight loss.” YES YES YES!!!
Finally, we’re seeing some mainstream media beginning to trickle the message out there. No, it’s not gonna change people’s thinking overnight because they’ve been brainwashed for so many years about how fat is clogging their arteries (insane, but widely believed to be true) and how healthy and wholesome carbohydrates are in the diet (when there is absolutely ZERO dietary need for carbohydrate in the diet). But with reporting like this from Consumer Reports and elsewhere, you can see the old guard is beginning to fall and the new wave of evidence-based nutrition based on the very latest scientific advancements in metabolic health are bursting through into the culture. I’ll keep reporting on any news sources that promote the high-fat, low-carb message and I have sneaky suspicion it’s gonna become more and more prevalent in the next few years leading up to the 2015 Dietary Guidelines. Something tells me that version of the Food Pyramid is gonna take a drastic turn for the better. Call me overly optimistic, but I can see it coming. Are you ready for it?
