IT’S NOW EASIER TO FIND LOW-CARB FOODS (5-2004)

Back in 1998, on the advice of my doctor, I started a 
counter-intuitive diet to combat my type-2 diabetes. It was 
a low-carb diet.

It was the first time I had ever heard of such a diet, one 
that would allow me to eat lots of meat, cheese, eggs, and 
fish as long as I didn’t accompany those items with bread, 
potatoes, pasta, or desserts.

But I did a lot of reading on the subject, including all 
the most popular low-carb diet books, and decided to give 
it a try. After nine consecutive months following the 
Atkins version of the diet, I had lost some weight, but not 
as much as I had hoped for. The good news, though, was that 
my diabetes was in control, as was my cholesterol and blood 
pressure.

When I told people about the diet, most of them scoffed. 
After all, everyone knew that to lose weight, you limit 
fat. And eating all that fatty food couldn’t possibly be 
good for you, could it? But it was.

I remember getting strange looks when I would go into a 
fast food restaurant and order a burger without the bun. 
And I got plenty of advice from well-meaning people to 
avoid those artery-clogging pork rinds.

Now, six years later, low-carb foods are the new diet 
craze. Everyone has heard about the low-carb diet. 
Suddenly, the old low-fat diet has become passé. 

What probably turned it all around was a 2002 expose in the 
New York Times by science writer Gary Taubes. In the 
article, Taubes debunked the “fat-is-bad” myth. 

And since Dr. Robert Atkins came out with his “New Diet 
Revolution” book in the early 1990s, there have been at 
least a dozen others coming out with low-carb diets of 
their own. There are differences among them, but they all 
center on the same main theme – to lose weight, limit your 
intake of carbohydrates.

And now, food manufacturers are beginning to grab hold of 
the diet’s popularity. Everything from cereals to beer now 
has a low-carb version. In 1998, if I wanted low-carb snack 
products, I would have to order them on the Internet from a 
limited number of retailers. Now, there is a plethora of 
low-carb foods in every supermarket. And many restaurants 
have low-carb menu selections now.

The latest product to go low-carb is wine. Some wineries 
are tapping into consumers' low-carb cravings with new 
labels listing calorie and carbohydrate counts. Several 
brands of beer are already touting their lower carbohydrate 
content.

For those of us who are diabetic, it’s a positive trend. 
But, although many people have found great success doing a 
low-carb diet where they had little or no success before, 
it is still a very restrictive diet. Not everyone can 
handle it. I backed off after the first nine months because 
I had stopped losing weight. But, if you’ll pardon my pun, 
I haven’t completed deserted it. 

I’ve found that it’s still possible to keep adequate blood 
sugar control with a controlled-carb diet, even if I don’t 
keep my intake of carbohydrates as low as what Atkins would 
recommend. 

And now, thanks to a much larger selection of low-carb 
foods in grocery stores and restaurants, it’s easier than 
it used to be to limit one’s intake of those nasty 
carbohydrates.