The Atkins Diet: Too Good To Be True?

9 Pages 2133 Words

Popular Culture is an interesting machine. Influencing everything from clothing to speech, but also touching subjects you would never think it would approach. This includes cell phone plans, shampoos, and even diets. There have been many cases recently of popular diets that people jump into because commercials, or popular culture, tell them that the diet will help them lose those unwanted pounds. If you recall in the nineteen nineties, there were two diets which took American culture by storm, zero calories and low fat products were staple products in everyone’s refrigerators. After countless products bought and millions of dollars spent there was research done on these two “diet plans” discovering that they weren’t helping anyone lose weight. These “diets” weren’t diets at all; they were just genius marketing plans by corporations and the diets did exactly what the corporations intended them to do, make money. Apparently as a culture we didn’t catch onto this trend in popular diet plans because a few years ago a new “miracle diet” hit the scene. This diet, of course, was the Atkins’ Diet which took over the country at a furious pace. Named after the inventor, the Atkins Diet made Dr. Robert C. Atkins an instant celebrity. He came out with a new diet that cut your intake of carbohydrates, which from what was said would increase weight loss. After a few celebrities jumped on the Atkins’ bandwagon there was no stopping it. The diet became an instant fixation nationally and it was hard to do anything without hearing something about carbs. It was amazing how quickly people latched onto this fad. Even more interesting was the fact that people didn’t stop the diet after Dr. Atkins himself died of a heart attack, resulting from his own diet. You would think that if the creator of the diet died of a heart attack and he used his diet, people would have been tipped off to stop. Unfortunately, many people did not stop an...