Atkins Nutritional Approach, popularly known as the Atkins Diet or just 'Atkins', is a well-known low-carbohydrate diet created by Dr.Robert Atkins from a diet he read in the Journal of the American Medical Association and utilized to resolve his own overweight condition following medical school and graduate medical training. He later popularized the Atkins diet in a series of books, starting with Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution in 1972. In his revised book, Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, he modified or changed some of his ideas, but remained faithful to the original concepts.

The Atkins franchise, a business formed to provide products to those individuals on the diet, was highly successful due to the popularity of the diet, and is considered the driving entity of the larger "low-carb craze" during the early millennium. Various factors, however, led to its dwindling success and the company founded by Dr. Atkins in 1989, Atkins Nutritionals of Ronkonkoma, New York, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July of 2005, two years after the death of Dr. Atkins. The company re-emerged in January 2006, and the Atkins logo is still highly visible through licensed-proprietary branding for food products and related merchandise. image:AtkinsDietBook.jpg

Nature of the diet

The Atkins Diet is a departure from previously prevailing metabolic theories. Atkins claimed there are two important unrecognized factors in Western eating habits which lead to obesity. First, the main cause of obesity is eating refined carbohydrates, particularly sugar, flour, and high-fructose corn syrups. Secondly, that saturated fat is overrated as a nutritional problem, being not as important in developing vascular disease, and that trans fats from sources such as hydrogenated oils are much more important in developing vascular disease.^needed Accordingly, Dr. Atkins rejected conventional nutritional advice (eg, that embodied in the food pyramid), instead claiming that the tremendous increase in refined carbohydrates has been responsible for the rise in metabolic disorders of the 20th century, and that the focus on the detrimental effects of dietary fat has actually contributed to the obesity problem by neglecting the increased proportion of carbohydrates in the diet.^needed While Atkins puts his emphasis on diet, nutritional supplements and exercise are also considered important elements.^needed

The Atkins Diet involves restriction of carbohydrates to more frequently switch the body's metabolism from burning glucose as fuel to burning stored body fat. This process (called ketosis) begins when insulin levels are low; in normal humans insulin is lowest when blood glucose levels are low (mostly before eating), and blood glucose levels are most fundamentally increased by ingestion of some kinds of carbohydrate (eg, glucose, starch (ie, long glucose chains)). Other kinds of carbohydrates don't participate in the insulin mechanism controlling metabolism. Ketosis involves lipolysis in which some of the lipid stores in fat cells are transferred to the blood. Ketosis is normal, and is the chief mechanism by which stored lipids are used for fuel; in principle, the body alternates between glucose metabolism and ketosis, being in glucose burning state after meals (especially meals with glucose content) and ketosis after ingested glucose is consumed. ^needed