http://www.fumento.com/fat/southbeach.html

Chic but Chubby
By Michael Fumento
Scripps Howard News Service, October 16, 2003
Copyright 2003 Scripps Howard News Service

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----

 
"South Beach" is just warmed-over Atkins.  

There's a magic formula to having a best-selling diet book - the book
itself must offer a magic formula. Namely, it must claim to have found a
way to fool human physiology so that weight is no longer determined by how
much you eat and exercise.

Cases in point: The Atkins diet spent about 2,000 years on the New York
Times bestseller list while The South Beach Diet reached No. 1 and is still
going strong.

Although the very first sentence in cardiologist Arthur Agatston's book is
"The South Beach Diet is not low-carb," like the Atkins diet that's
precisely what it is.

Otherwise, Agatston wouldn't have invoked the same magic formula of the
late Dr. Atkins, that of "hyperinsulinemia." This says that foods high on
the hypoglycemic index, invariably carbohydrates, send sugar rushing into
the bloodstream. The pancreas then shoots insulin like a fire hose to clear
the sugar out of the blood and into the organs. But now that same insulin
makes the body hunger for more sugar, creating a vicious cycle and causing
obesity.

The title invokes images of thin beautiful people, but it's just a
variation on a concept that predates bikinis by almost a century.
 
Yet, "There is no compelling evidence that in normal individuals day-to-day
fluctuations of the blood glucose level are an important determinant of how
much food is consumed," University of Washington endocrinologist Michael
Schwartz told me. But "Although the concept that insulin triggers weight
gain has little scientific merit," he wrote earlier in the journal Science,
"it remains a key selling point for advocates of diets that are low in
carbohydrate and high in protein and fat."

-snip-

----

Jean C
 "You'll never become what you can be...
   until you eat all f.cking day"
    -author unknown
http://www.uidaho.edu/~bjcraw/