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01-13-2004	Previous edition: 01-12-2004

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Atkins revolution goes commercial

And the Lord spoke, saying, "Thou shalt feast upon my creations until thy belly becomes too fat and bloated to see thy feet. Then thou shalt make a pilgrimage to Borders, and there thou shalt find the holiest book to relieve thy fast-food indiscretions."

What the good man upstairs is talking about, my babies, is the high-fat, low-carb Atkins diet, the latest underground craze to go public since Saddam.
The Atkins diet consists of eating fatty, high-protein foods while waving bye-bye to carbohydrates and sugars. Carbohydrates are those things found in bread, pasta, potatoes, fruits, etc.

Instead of cereal for breakfast, you cook sausage patties, bacon and ham, which I recently learned came from the same magical animal. Wrap your burgers in lettuce instead of a bun for lunch and have lots and lots of meat for dinner.

If this doesn't sound like your kind of thing, just look at the results it brings.
"Dateline NBC" recently aired a story called "Losing it: Dateline Ultimate Diet Challenge" in which six people who graduated in 1978 from Quincy High School in Massachusetts were followed as they tried to lose weight in the months leading up to their 25th reunion.

Each person chose a different way to lose her weight, with the horizontally challenged selecting everything from Slim-Fast to marathon running. One guy even had himself hypnotized into eating right and exercising. But the Atkins stud lost the most, dropping a massive 108 pounds. That's a Cowboys cheerleader!

Richard Atkins' diet book has been around since the ‘70s and has been on the best-seller list since the Clinton administration. Now it seems every food outlet, restaurant and fast-food place is catering to those Atkinites and watching their weight and carbs for them. The diet has blown up bigger than Ricky Martin.

Maybe Houston (named the fattest city in the United States three years running by Men's Fitness Magazine) will finally shed those lone star pounds and stop being the city all the other cities make fun of for wearing mu-mu's and having to wash its back with a towel-wrapped plunger.

Maybe now Chicago (No. 2 on the list) will stop waiting until all the other cities are done to take a shower for fear of getting its flabby butt flicked with a wet wash cloth.

Subway has introduced Atkins-friendly wraps. (Camera shot of little freckled boy taking a bite of the Chicken Bacon Ranch Wrap.) They're as delicious as they are nutritious (thumbs up)! It's a quality sandwich from the place that gave birth to Jerod-mania.

All are jumping on the Atkin-wagon. McDonald's and Wendy's are pushing their salads, and Hardees has come out with Atkins-friendly burgers wrapped in lettuce instead of carbohydrate-heavy bread buns.

Have we all turned Communist? A wrap from Subway is one thing, but going commercial with Atkins burgers is entirely another thing.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I believe we should worship the moon and sun as powerful gods. And I also believe that the American institution known as the fast-food burger should not be stripped down to the nubs like a husbandless J-Lo.

Do what you want in the privacy of your own home (I've been known to wrap a slice of Iron Kids bread around a hot dog if I'm desperate), but to air your dirty laundry in public like this is an outrage.

Meat, cheese and lettuce does not a burger make!

On top of that, Scott Blank, a registered dietitian at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center, said that the diet could hurt your kidneys because the high amounts of protein build up excess amounts of nitrogen in the body, which has to be processed through the kidneys.

Not to mention that people are now piling on the mayonnaise and leaving the fruits alone, which could be clogging up their arteries like a bunch of Horatio Sanz and all of his brothers and cousins falling down a well.

Although a little fat in your diet is healthy, you’re not going to convince me that the Tub O’ Lard my grandmother gets from Sam’s Club to make her famous Fried Heart Attack Chicken is more healthy than a bowl of peas.

I know I can’t eat mayonnaise by itself. I leave that to Europeans and those people who have eating competitions on ESPN2. Even the Atkins stud from “Dateline NBC” developed a bad case of gout half-way through his so-called healthy diet. Is that what I’ll get if I want to look better in Under Armor? Gout?!

Health risks aside, this Atkins craze is just one of a bajillion other dieting fads that will eventually rest on the back-burner. I just hope the bubble bursts on this dieting craze before they have to shut down Fazoli's. No man should endure life without free breadsticks.

Evan Kelsay is a sophomore in the School of Management. He can be reached at opinoins@purdueexponent.org

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Atkins revolution goes commercial

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