Lowcarbezine!

Dr. Fatkins?

On February 10th, the Wall Street Journal ran the story that Dr. Atkins's final medical records showed that he weighed 258 pounds when he died. The story also mentioned that Atkins had heart problems, and speculated that these two facts were evidence that Dr. Atkins's diet was dangerous. This has lead to ugly stories about "Dr. Fatkins" and the like, and some people deciding that a nutritional program that has manifestly improved their health is actually a threat. I think it is vitally important that Lowcarbezine! readers know the truth about this story - both about Atkins's condition when he died, and where the story came from.

It is true that Dr. Atkins weighed 258 pounds when he died. This does not, however, mean that Atkins was, as implied, obese. Dr. Atkins was a very public personality, appearing on television several times in his final year; had he been obese it would have been impossible to hide it. When he entered the hospital eight days before his death, having suffered a head injury from a slip-and-fall accident, he weighed only 195 pounds - hardly obese.

So how on earth did Dr. Atkins gain 63 pounds in just 8 days? Here's where his heart problems come in.

It is true that Dr. Atkins had heart problems; he had suffered a cardiac arrest just about a year before he died. However, his cardiac arrest was not caused by coronary artery disease. Rather, Dr. Atkins had a viral infection of his heart muscle, also known as viral cardiomyopathy, weakening his heart and causing congestive heart failure. When Atkins had his cardiac arrest, he was given an angiogram, and his coronary arteries were found to be normal.

It wasn't only Dr. Atkins's personal cardiologist, Patrick Fratellone, who said so. Dr. Clyde Yancy, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and a member of the American Heart Association's national board of directors, said, "Despite the obvious irony, I believe there is a total disconnect between the cardiac arrest and the health approach he (Atkins) popularizes." Since the American Heart Association has long pushed a low fat diet, and been skeptical of the Atkins approach, I find Dr. Yancy's statement particularly compelling.

Cardiomyopathy causes water retention; indeed, edema is often the symptom that leads to a diagnosis of congestive heart failure. As Dr. Atkins lay unconscious, his body slowly failing, the intravenous fluids he was given collected, bloating his body mercilessly - and resulting in that final weight of 258 pounds. This is heart-rending and tragic, but it is not an indictment of Dr. Atkins's diet.

So why the ugly stories? To understand that, you need to know where the story came from.

Dr. Atkins's medical records were given to the press by the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine. If this name sounds familiar, it may be because I wrote about them in December. ( http://www.holdthetoast.com/archive/031217.html ) To recap: Despite its name, the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine, 95% of whose members are not physicians, is an animal rights organization with deep and inextricable ties to People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) - they get most of their funding from PETA, have shared offices with them, and Dr. Neal Barnard, the psychiatrist who is the director of the PCRM, is staff medical advisor to PETA.

Despite posing as a non-partisan organization concerned only with human health, Barnard and the PCRM are instead radical vegan activists. They have long done their best to denigrate the animal food-rich Atkins diet, and Dr. Atkins himself. An example: The PCRM solicited stories of people who had been harmed by the Atkins diet, then presented those stories as conclusive evidence that despite all of the clinical studies showing the Atkins diet to be safe and effective, it was actually terribly dangerous - with no evidence that the stories were true, that the "harm"was actually caused by the diet, or even that the people who wrote to them were following the Atkins diet as prescribed in Atkins's book. And of course, they didn't talk to the millions of people whose health has actually improved on Atkins or other low carbohydrate diets. This approach goes beyond unscientific to downright dishonest.

In this light, it is not surprising that the PCRM tried to spin Atkins's weight at death and viral heart disease into some sort of "Atkins was fat and had clogged arteries!" scandal, though it is surprising that the Wall Street Journal picked up such a scandal-rag type story. I'll never see the Journal in quite the same way again.

Where did the PCRM get Atkins's confidential medical records in the first place? Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the New York City office of the chief medical examiner, said the records were erroneously sent to Dr. Richard M. Fleming of the Fleming Heart and Health Institute in Omaha, Nebraska. Dr. Fleming is a member of the PCRM, and is currently promoting a book of his own, advocating a low fat, high carbohydrate, vegetarian diet. Having requested and obtained the medical records, Fleming saw fit to turn them over to his pals. Fleming claims he had no idea that the PCRM would go public with Atkins's medical records, but given the history of both the PCRM and PETA, such a statement marks Fleming as stupid, painfully naive, or disingenuous. You may take your pick.

I cannot begin to express how revolted I am by the PCRM's ghoulish behavior, but I cannot say I am surprised. After all, they're hand-in-glove with PETA, the organization that exploited Rudolph Giuliani's prostate cancer for their own political gain, handed out flyers on college campuses urging students to drink beer instead of milk, and asked Timothy McVeigh to become their poster boy from death row.

Since this story broke, a few people have said to me, "Well, if Dr. Atkins's diet didn't kill him, why hide his medical records? What's the big deal?" Ignoring entirely that Dr. Atkins and his family are entitled to the same confidentiality of medical records as you or I, the answer is two fold. First of all, Veronica Atkins, widowed less than a year, should not have been subjected to this sort of ugliness and pain; that she has been is nothing short of vicious. My heart goes out to Mrs. Atkins, and I sincerely hope she sues Dr. Fleming and the PCRM for everything they're worth. A win in court won't heal her grief, but it would go a long way to preventing this sort of behavior in the future.

Secondly, having seen the media feeding frenzy after Dr. Atkins's cardiac arrest, I can't blame Mrs. Atkins and the Atkins Center for not wanting to share Atkins's medical records with the press. They had already demonstrated that the facts about Dr. Atkins's heart problems needn't stand in the way of a juicy story, why expect them to care about truth over trumped-up scandal this time around?

I hope that you, as a low carb dieter, have not been taken in by this fear-mongering. Not only is there no reason to believe Dr. Atkins died from the effects of his low carbohydrate diet, there are several recent, well-conducted medical studies backing up everything Dr. Atkins claimed for his diet: That it was effective not only for weight loss without hunger, but for improving cholesterol and triglyceride numbers, too.

If you still have any lingering doubts, ask yourself: Am I more or less healthy since I started my low carbohydrate diet? Have I lost weight? Do I feel better? Do I have more energy? Does my blood work look good? Is my blood sugar stable? Because that, my friends, is the bottom line.

Posted by HoldTheToast at February 23, 2004 07:01 PM