Atkins diet gets healthier

The Atkins Diet, the original low-carbohydrate regimen launched by Dr. Robert Atkins in the '70s, has been reworked in a new book that promises it's healthier and more effective than ever.

A new cookbook is reintroducing the Atkins diet in a way that allows dieters to eat more vegetables than ever.

The New Atkins for a New You: The Ultimate Diet for Shedding Weight and Feeling Great, authored by Dr. Eric Westman, Dr. Stephen Phinney and Dr. Jeff Volek, modifies the low-carbohydrate regimen unveiled by Dr. Robert Atkins in 1972 for the 21st century.

"The best way to describe this book is that it makes it easier to do the Atkins Diet than ever before," the New York Daily News quoted Westman, who also is an associate professor of medicine at Duke University, as saying.

He added: "We've added a whole new element of flexibility and rewritten the Atkins Diet to include all the updates in science."

Ever since it was launched, the four-phase Atkins Diet has been both popular and controversial.

While film stars like Renee Zellweger, Jennifer Aniston and Kim Cattrall followed the diet, which emphasises on high protein and minimum carbohydrate intake, to shed extra pounds, critics panned it for promoting meats and fats. However, the new Atkins Diet is quite pro-veggie.

Westman said: "If there is one thing to disprove, it's the myth that vegetables are not included on Atkins. That's just not true. On a day-to-day basis, we want people to eat four to five servings of them regardless of the phase. We instruct people on using net carbs, which allows them to subtract the fiber grams from the total grams of carbs."

"Atkins has always been a way of eating that promotes good, healthy food like vegetables."

The book also buries the myth that followers were encouraged to eat high protein food like red meat.

Westman said: "There was a misunderstanding that you could eat as much protein as you wanted and people who didn't know how the diet worked would just gorge themselves. But there's a hunger control that just occurs naturally in the body. In studies that have been done, people eat until they have matched the appropriate protein intake for their body. It should just happen naturally."