Wednesday, December 26, 2007

To quote the late P.T. Barnum...

...there's one born every minute. 'Tis the season - albeit early - for diet fads. Checketh out the following story in Dagbladet: Gå ned 2 kilo til nyttår (Lose 2 kilos by New Year's eve). How do they propose you accomplish this? Why the Atkins diet, of course - here dubbed the "GI method", GI being Glycemic Index. In short; don't eat fast-acting carbohydrates (high GI), as cuttin' down on carbs will increase fat burning. Go with lo-carb and hi-protein. The Atkins diet is one of the quickest routes to weight loss, it says. Here in Norway, we have our own version of Atkins - "Dr." Fedon Lindberg, a fat but not jolly greek dude whose philosophy on diet coincides with that of Atkins (and on what bodybuilders have referred to as the ketosis diet since the fifties or sixties), with the added twist that what we typically eat in Norway is crap, while what he used to be fed by his mom when he was a kid in Greece is the perfect food. What are the odds.....

If you're looking for a diet strategy, you might want to check out Atkinsexposed.org, or simply google the guy. Simply put - stay as far away from this strategy as you possibly can. Any degree of common sense will tell you that a diet strategy in which eating unlimited amounts of butter, bacon and eggs probably isn't gonna do wonders for your health. The American Medical Association has issued an official condemnation of the Atkins diet, and if that isn't enough for ya, then consider this: Atkins developed a heart condition around 2000 and subsequently died from kidney failure.

Losing weight ain't rocket science. Losing fat and retaining muscle still ain't rocket science. Just stay in a slight caloric deficit while increasing the activity level over a long period of time will work wonders. Just don't think that there's a magic short-cut without severe consequences for your health. Like 'Cube says - chickety-check yo'self before you wreck yo'self.

2 comments:

Anders said...

Great - and especially since they added a link to another aticle at the end, with the title "Cancer alert for low carb diet (Kreftalarm for lavkarbodiett)" so they are actually warning about and recommending the diet in the same article. Great!

Btw, the big players in Norway when it comes to the GI diett, is Dag Viljen Polyzsinski and Kenn Hallstensen, both claims to be experts on nutrition. Dag Viljen Polyzsinski even sometimes uses the title "professor", even though the The University College in Harstad redraw his Professor II title which they meant was given to him by mistake. And searching in publications, I can't find any peer-review articles by any of them. Polyzsinski has some articles in Tidskrift for Den norske Lægeforening, but that hardly qualifies as a publication. I haven't been able to find anything on Hallstensen (though I admit I just did a very quick search).

Btw, I've seen Polyzsinski in TV debates, and I can't understand how people can take him serious. His theories are just plain nonsense.

Wilhelm said...

Your google-fu skills are strong, Sifu Anders.

Stuff like this totally underscores my gripe with mainstream journalism - lots of people are gonna follow dumbass diets because they're outlined in some major paper, and then possibly suffer some pretty grim consequences. Worst of all, the people who lose a bunch of weight using Atkins type diets never figure out why all the weight comes back on when they go off the diet.

Realistically, there ought to be some kind of rule in place stating that if you recommend people to lose weight by only eating two candy bars and a handful of broken glass every day, legal action can and will be taken against you.