Dr Robert Atkins: The True Story of the Man Behind the War on Carbohydrates

Ich habe heute im Internet einen langen Artikel über Dr. Robert Atkins gefunden. Leider nur auf Englisch. Ich habe ihn selbst noch nicht gelesen, aber ich dachte mir, daß es vielleicht den ein oder anderen hier interessieren könnte.

Viele Grüße
Jochen


Und hier ist der Artikel:


The hungry heart

After Christmas and the New Year, thoughts turn to losing weight. Lisa Rogak, biographer of Robert Atkins, the diet king, reveals a cautionary tale that may make you think again

The morning of April 8, 2003, started out like any other for Dr Robert Atkins. Even though he was 72 and could have retired on his wealth many years ago, he got up early to put in a full day seeing patients at the Atkins Center in Manhattan.

Once a vigorous figure who took in his stride many affairs with female patients, Atkins looked tired. It was a year since a heart attack, which his personal doctor had blamed — publicly at least — on an infection but critics had attributed to the controversial eat-as-much-steak-as-you-like low-carb diet he had made famous.

He shrugged off his drained appearance by attributing it to the battle he had fought through the years to get his ideas recognised. Now, however, it seemed that this fight was winding down. Several positive studies on low-carb diets had been published in the very medical journals that had previously lambasted him and his theories. His critics were as vociferous as ever, but they were increasingly drowned out by the positive press.

First created in the 1960s, the Atkins diet had taken on a new popularity: low-carb mania had spread around the world. Some of the most famous faces of the 2000s, including Renée Zellweger, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennifer Aniston and Britney Spears, ascribed their lissome limbs to Atkins. His business was estimated to be worth about $750m.

As he left his Sutton Place apartment building in Manhattan for the walk to work, Atkins found an unseasonably wintry day. There was almost a foot of snow in the gutter and pavements were icy in places.

About 20 minutes later Keith Berkowitz, one of the staff at the Atkins Center, noticed a group of people in front of the building.

“I saw a bag off to the side that looked very familiar to me,” Berkowitz remembered. “That’s when I realised everyone was hunched over Dr Atkins, who was lying on the ground.”

Atkins was bleeding profusely from the back of his head. He was conscious for a few minutes, but by the time the ambulance arrived and they were speeding to the hospital he had lost it completely. He never recovered.

Usually when a man dies, even if he is the most hated around, there is no reason to kick him any more. But even though Atkins was dead the monster he had created was very much alive. Suddenly everyone wanted to get in bed with the beast. And those who didn’t had no problem beating him down.

New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, was caught on tape saying he thought the real reason for the doctor’s death was covered up. “I don’t believe that bullshit that he dropped dead after slipping on the sidewalk,” said the mayor. “Yeah, right. The guy was fat. Big guy, but heavy.”

An anti-Atkins group publicised an illegally obtained copy of his death records that purported to show he weighed more than 18 stone when he died — obese for a six-footer.

Atkins’s widow, Veronica, hit back, calling the critics “vegetarian Taliban” and declaring: “I will not let anything, anybody denigrate my Bobby.”

Such was Atkins’s fame that the NBC network gave nearly an hour of primetime television to an investigation into whether the low-carb guru had been killed by his own diet. It concluded that he had been “overweight” rather than obese — he had been pumped up with fluids in hospital before his death.

One thing stood out, however: while everyone had something to say — good or bad — about the diet, little was known about Atkins himself, who he was and what he was like. He hadn’t been too keen on people knowing much about his life. So who was this man whose controversial theories had so many of the world’s beautiful people in thrall?

IN ORDER to understand Atkins’s life all you need to know is one thing: he was mortally afraid of being hungry.

He was 33 years old and 40lb overweight when he first decided to go on a diet. He found it left him constantly hungry. But it wasn’t just physical hunger that consumed him. He was hungry for success, material possessions, women. The overriding theme of his life was that, no matter how much he had, it would never be enough.

Once he was able to control his physical hunger his other appetites took centre stage as a cruel form of compensation. But no matter how many patients he saw, women he dated, or hours he worked, he would never feel satisfied.

Atkins was the son of a confectioner, an interesting piece of family history considering that he spent more than half of his life railing against sugar.

The descendant of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born in 1930 in Columbus, Ohio. It was the era of the depression. Yet, although the sweets his father plied were clearly a luxury people could live without, even the most destitute craved a treat now and then. Atkins would later take that to heart, correctly surmising that if people could indulge in treats they thought were forbidden and still lose weight, he could become very successful indeed.

His father schooled him in business at an early age, taking him on his rounds to customers and letting him close a deal or two. The boy could be so convincing in his “shtick” that he would end up moving more merchandise than his father. In later years it was not hard to pick up this early hucksterism when Atkins defended his diet in front of the television cameras.

Atkins did well at school, coming second in a state-wide test to find the brightest high school student in Ohio when he was 17. His former classmate Robert Rafner remembers: “He started to regard himself as being more important than everybody else, and since he obviously had more potential, he could even think about becoming famous.”

For college-bound Jewish boys in the 1940s, however, options were few. It was a not so well kept secret that there were certain colleges where Jews could not apply. The most notorious were the elite Ivy League.

Atkins enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he discovered a gift for stand-up comedy, doing so well that a talent scout presented him with a contract. Atkins was about to sign it when he mentioned that he had been planning to become a doctor. The scout tore up the contract and advised him to go to medical school instead.

Atkins figured he could always incorporate his flair for comedy into his practice as doctor. After all, the aim of both professions was to make people feel better.

Ronald Arky, today a professor of medicine at Harvard, enrolled in the same class as Atkins at Cornell medical school in New York. They were two of only three Jewish students in a class of 90. (There were only two women.) “Cornell wasn’t exactly known for its openness for accepting Jews,” says Arky.

By the time he completed his studies and hospital training eight years later, the seeds had been planted for Atkins to become a very different kind of doctor from those that Cornell liked as alumni.

There had been an incident at a hospital in upstate New York where Atkins had been training. He never really confided the full details but hinted he had had a major fight with the head of the hospital. Arky believes that this experience triggered a lifelong bitterness toward the medical establishment and hospitals in particular. Atkins decided he would never associate himself with the extremely political world of hospitals again. He could not relate easily even to junior hospital staff.

“He was not a particularly warm man and had a tendency to be brusque, so he didn’t mix well with the nurses and other doctors,” said Barbara Stinson, a nurse at Boston City hospital where Atkins did some postgraduate training.

He had been a successful ladies’ man at college, but when he made a play for the nurses after work he became a nuisance.

“He flirted with all of us, waiting to see if he could talk one of us into going home with him for the night,” said Stinson. “It would start out harmless enough, but he was too much of a pest.”

Atkins opened a medical practice as a cardiologist on East 68th Street, Manhattan. To help pay the bills he worked at night as an emergency doctor, specialising in suspected heart attacks. He also took on work with corporations including DuPont and AT&T, watching over the health of their executives. He quickly figured out that if he could treat corporate stars, why not go for real stars? He started to hang out among the movers and shakers in the art world to solicit new patients. He may not have been able to afford the art at the galleries but he met the people who could. And if they had that kind of money they could afford to be his patient.

He also made another breakthrough. On emergency calls at night he often found himself dashing to New York’s theatre district, where the wealthy would head out for dinner and a show — and sometimes suffer a heart attack. As he frantically tried to revive the prone victims, Atkins noticed the preponderance of beautiful showgirls among the watching crowds.

He decided the theatre world was a good place to trawl not only for people with money but also for girls.

A former university classmate who visited his consulting room soon afterwards told Arky it was like “an audition for a Broadway musical . . . all the patients were beautiful showgirls”.

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__________________
21.05.06: 160,5 kg ... jetzt auf LOGI
28.05.06: 156,4 kg (- 4,1 kg)

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Things were looking up; but how was he going to become famous? On November 22, 1963, a horrified Atkins sat watching the television coverage of the assassination of President John F Kennedy. The tragedy had a catalytic effect.

“I felt I had to do something, anything,” Atkins said years later. “So I went on a diet.”

He was certainly fat. He had weighed less than 10 stone on leaving high school; now he was more than 16 stone and had three chins.

Diets made him so hungry, however, that he couldn’t focus on anything except getting something to eat. Combing through medical literature for ways to lose weight without going hungry, he discovered fasting. He read that a faster ceases to be hungry after the first day or so because of “ketosis”: the body is forced to burn fat for fuel.

The spark for his future empire was struck when he read that ketosis could also be achieved by consuming protein and fat but no carbohydrates. He threw out the bread and doughnuts in his kitchen and lost two stone in six weeks without a moment’s hunger. This was a revelation: would the low-carbohydrate diet be his ticket to fame? He tried out a low-carb experiment on 65 AT&T executives. They didn’t know quite what to make of the instructions to eat all the steak, lobster and butter they wanted. But their weight fell. The news spread in AT&T. Atkins introduced patients in his cardiology practice to the diet. Again, the success was immediate and word quickly travelled. Atkins was active on the social circuit, drumming up business for his fledgling practice and meeting women. That’s how he met an editor at Vogue, who heard about his diet, tried it, then featured it in the magazine, which brought more patients.

Any slackers received tough treatment. Atkins sat behind a massive mahogany desk set high on a platform so that patients had to look up at him as he bullied them.

Fran Gare, a former patient, tells of her first visit: “Through the door I heard Dr Atkins berating a patient for having gone off the diet. I heard sobbing then a promise that she would never cheat again. When the door opened I was amazed to see a well dressed extremely thin woman walk out. Her eyes were red and puffy and when she saw me she nodded, as if to say, ‘He’s all yours’.”

Some patients were not thinking only about their weight. Atkins had developed a reputation as being good in bed and a number of women became his patients solely to have sex with him.

Arky recalls that Atkins would keep friends updated on the way he mixed his social life with his medical practice. “He would often tell me he had patients who wanted to sleep with him and so they stuck to the diet just so they could get into bed with him,” said Arky.

Challenged that this was unethical, Atkins argued: “They came to me first.”

One woman, recalling those days, said she considered Atkins a quack but wanted to sleep with him. “I could always lose the weight, that wasn’t the problem,” she said. “I just wanted to jump his bones.”

She became a patient, went on the diet, lost a few pounds to make him happy, then went to bed with him. Afterwards she went off the diet because she didn’t think it was healthy and the weight came back.

Atkins also propositioned patients. He dated so many that he came to view the line, “Call the office and let me give you a glucose tolerance test”, as his own take on, “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” A woman named Barbara who served as the “spokesmodel” for a food company in the 1960s and 1970s went to Atkins for advice after weight gain threatened her job. He asked her out during her second visit while administering a glucose tolerance test.

Barbara brushed him off, but on the next visit accepted. They were an item for a time, but she quickly grew tired of his philandering.

“Bob’s the kind of guy that likes to check out different women,” she said. “I got tired of him dating around so much, and finally I told him I wanted to be number one. He thought about it for a couple of days and finally said okay.”

She lasted only a week or two until the next woman came along. His swarthy good looks — and rising income — were considered a hot ticket by any number of beautiful young women.

Atkins also regularly dated his nurses. Former employees say he hired them on their looks. “He liked women with nice-looking ankles,” said Bernard Raxlen, a doctor who worked with Atkins in the 1980s, “but I always told him his hiring criteria weren’t very smart.”

Atkins would get involved with a new employee for a couple of weeks then dump her when the next attractive patient or prospective employee came along.

When not seducing patients and nurses, he relaxed by watching Star Trek on television — he was a diehard fan — or playing with his old english sheepdog Durn Durn, the only stable fixture in his life.

Atkins’s big breakthrough came when two celebrity patients, the newly thin comedians Buddy Hackett and Kaye Ballard, made an appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. They told him about the unusual diet.

“You know how I lost this weight?” Hackett asked the audience. “By eating.”

From that point on, word began to spread across the American media world. Editors, publishers, marketing executives and Hollywood producers started to hear raves about the diet from colleagues. After Harper’s Bazaar ran a story, Town & Country, Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle featured the diet in their pages. The movie producer David Brown, husband of the renowned magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown, lost 40lb on the diet. Atkins learnt early on to sell the sizzle as well as the steak by emphasising that his diet included all the foods that were supposed to be fattening and “bad”. He learnt how to manipulate the media and perfect the art of the soundbite.

“In every interview that he ever did he would always make some kind of sweeping statement,” said Arline Brecher, an author and food writer who first met Atkins in the early 1970s. “But that was the one thing that people knew about him. I mean, he always talked about eating steak and bacon, but if you read his book, if you really talk to him, or if you were a patient of his, he only said you could eat it.”

It didn’t take long for book publishers to begin circling. Oscar Dystel, the publisher of Bantam Books, stepped in after an acquaintance lost 100lb on Atkins. He offered an advance of $30,000 for paperback rights, a huge sum then.

Atkins claimed later that he wanted to target the book at the medical community. But “the publisher told me, ‘This isn’t a medical book, it’s a popular book that will be bought by people who don’t normally read books’”.

The first edition of Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution appeared in September 1972. Most thought Atkins’s ideas laughable. Others, veterans of the chalky foul-tasting diet shakes and potions that family doctors often prescribed then, figured it was worth a shot. By January 1973 the book was selling 100,000 a week and surpassed 1m total sales.

Women threw themselves at him in the wake of his huge success. Atkins seemed to welcome all comers as long as they were young and pretty. Nurses also wanted to come to work for the famous diet doctor. His lifelong feeling that no matter how much he had it would never be enough clearly applied when it came to women.

“At that time women for him were just the chase, and he didn’t talk much about the individual women themselves except in terms of jumping their bones,” said Raxlen. “They were the prey and afterward he would discard them, which is awfully hard if you are hiring that person to integrate them into your staff.”

“He was the swinging bachelor type, and there are stories about wild cocaine parties in his penthouse during the 1970s,” said another friend. He was quite the stud, making New York magazine’s annual list of the city’s top 10 bachelors several times into the 1980s before he finally married.

As his private practice grew, so did Atkins’s wealth. Beyond touting for patients at gallery openings, he started to learn about modern art. He even bought a few pieces, and would often send one of his nurses to bid at auction.

“More times than I’d care to remember I’d spend my lunch hour at an auction at Christie’s wearing my nurse uniform surrounded by rich New Yorkers dressed in mink,” said Judy Klopp, head nurse at the Atkins Center for 15 years.

Raxlen believes there was irony in Atkins’s pursuit of art, which continued for the rest of his life. “In later years he could have taken all the money he was spending on the art and used it instead to sustain a good clinical trial where he could have doubled the life expectancy of people from the beginning. He was certainly wealthy enough, but he wasn’t the least bit interested in substantiating his intuitive clinical practice with the science of good research back then.”

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__________________
21.05.06: 160,5 kg ... jetzt auf LOGI
28.05.06: 156,4 kg (- 4,1 kg)

...

This was the problem: Atkins argued that the evidence of his patients proved that his low-carb theories were valid. But there was no scientific research to speak of, particularly on the long-term effects of the diet. Other doctors began to demand proof that the low-carb approach was not only effective but also healthy.

The first clue that his instant fame wasn’t all it was cracked up to be came in the spring of 1973. As his book shot to the top of the charts, stealing media attention from other experts who had diets of their own to promote, it brought the critics out of the woodwork.

The Medical Society of the State of New York held a press conference to denounce the Atkins diet and the news made headlines across the country. Several days later the American Medical Association (AMA) published a damning paper that took no account of evidence he had provided to it.

Atkins was livid. “This is another example of the AMA’s persistence in trying to force obese individuals to continue their eating patterns despite the commonsense observation of every dieter that sugars and starches are fattening,” he said.

Fired by venom and a feeling that the powers that be in medicine had it in for him, he set out to prove them wrong every step of the way. This fight consumed much of the rest of his life. He was a pit bull of a man, unyielding to critics until the day he died. But how true was he to his own theories?

As early as 1974 he took a risk in revealing to Roger Rapoport, a reporter writing a book about celebrity doctors, that he broke the rules. Over a weekend at the Hamptons, Atkins let it slip that he had orange juice with his bacon and eggs for breakfast every day.

His female companion for the weekend seemed shocked. She told him, “No you can’t, it’s not on your diet”, to which he replied, “I have a swig or two.” “I have almost no willpower,” Atkins admitted. “In fact, I’m the kind of guy who will ask the waiter for something to eat while we’re being served.”

To his credit Rapoport did not sell this to the tabloids, which would have made it the lead story: “Diet Doctor Cheats on Own Diet.”

It was a danger Atkins constantly faced. One former associate recalls that they constantly had to be on the lookout for people hovering around the restaurant table to see what was on the doctor’s plate. This same person suspects some of his enemies bribed restaurant chefs and staff to provide a complete report of everything Atkins ate.

The critics didn’t have to look far. Kurt Greenberg, a former patient, said he would often show up at a dinner at a convention or trade show where Atkins would be dining.

“Some of the doctors are really into their diets one hundred per cent, but others get up on the podium and give their speeches and then they go and eat and drink everything in sight,” he noted.

“I never saw it with Dr Atkins. I just saw him eating some bread and pasta and other foods that didn’t conform to his dietary recommendations, but he didn’t go crazy like the others. It just meant he was off his diet.”

Another friend, Betty Kamen, remembered that sometimes Atkins’s appearance would signal he was not following his diet.

“We were concerned because he was overweight and he really did not take care of himself,” she said. “If you are on a really good diet, you are not overweight and you don’t look the way he looked. He never looked healthy. We always had the feeling, unfortunately, that he didn’t walk his talk.”

In the end he was also a tormented man. “I don’t think in his heart and soul the man could rest,” said Maryann Raxlen, who worked with Atkins in the 1980s.

“It wasn’t enough for him just to be a doctor; he needed to be looked at as unusual, and he needed constant praise, so he would hire people who he knew would only praise him and tell him things he wanted to hear. And despite all the money he made, he never felt rich.”

© Lisa Rogak 2005

Dr Robert Atkins: The True Story of the Man Behind the War on Carbohydrates by Lisa Rogak will be published by Robson Books in March at £8.99


Quelle: Times Online, 2. Januar 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...2446_1,00.html

__________________
21.05.06: 160,5 kg ... jetzt auf LOGI
28.05.06: 156,4 kg (- 4,1 kg)