When Faith Is Toast By Richard Cohen Thursday, February 12, 2004; Page A37
Near where I live is a marvelous bakery. Sometimes I stand outside the window, like some forlorn
figure from Dickens, and watch people eat their bread, lathering it with butter or jelly or --
someone stop me! -- cream cheese on a toasted anything. I love bread more than almost anything in
the world, but I will not have it, cannot have it, have not had it -- all on account of Robert
Atkins, who died last year at the age of 72, weighing 258 pounds, or 50 to 60 pounds overweight. For
years, I've been on his diet.
The circumstances of Atkins's death are somewhat in dispute. Officially, he died from a fall --
slipped on ice and hit his head. At the same time, his medical records show that he had a history of
heart problems and was way overweight when he died. The people who run the Atkins diet industry
insist that nothing about the diet figured either in Atkins's death, or his history of heart
problems, and that his obesity at death was due to a fluid buildup caused by the heart problems.
This is their story and they're sticking to it. My story is that I've been on something like the
Atkins diet for years. I say "something like" since I never actually read his diet book or consulted
a doctor of any kind. I simply listened to what my friends were saying and cut out bread and pasta
and started eating meat. It worked. I lost weight. Sure, I missed my bread. Sure, I missed my bagel
in the morning. And sure, I missed my pasta, which I enjoyed at least once a day. It was tough to
give all that up. But in exchange, I got to eat meat, which meant steak, which is what I was not
supposed to eat until Dr. Atkins, blessed be he, came along and repealed all sorts of laws of nature
or physics. I loved the guy. I could have bacon. This was Atkins's greatest gift. Not only was bacon
suddenly okay and not, as it had been before, the precursor of almost-instant death, but it was
actually good for you. Every morning, I had three slices of delicious bacon. What a diet! On
weekends, I sometimes had more than three slices, figuring that if three slices were good for me,
six were even better, a virtual fountain of youth from which I could drink each morning of a very,
very long life. Now, all of that is being brought into question. A group of anti-Atkins guerrilla
fighters, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which advocates vegetarian diets, got
hold of the New York City medical examiner's report on Atkins's death and went to town with it. They
raised all sorts of questions: Why the heart condition? Why was he so obese? Did his diet contribute
to his heart problems? In other words, could you really eat fat and lose weight at the same time --
and stay healthy? After all, 72 is not that old. For me -- and countless others -- much depends on
the answer to that question, and I'm not talking about diet and health. I'm talking instead about
gullibility, about wanting to believe something so badly that common sense got shoved aside. (Bacon,
indeed!) The Atkins diet made me into a believer. Here I was, all these years, the sort of person
who laughed when some homophobe turned out to be gay or some cultural conservative was found in the
hay with a 16-year-old. I scoffed at people who were always discovering that college sports were
corrupt or that "fan" was just another word for sucker. Me? I floated above it all. I believed fully
and without reservation in cynicism. Cynicism will never let you down. And yet every morning, I did
my little religious number from the church of
Dr. Atkins. I had my bacon. It made no sense -- not to me, anyway -- but it gave me something I
wanted, which happened to be the bacon. Later in the day, I could have my steak -- the fattier,
the better -- and take solace from the sacrifice I was making by forswearing bread and pasta.
Now, I am experiencing a crisis of faith. Atkins is dead and his secret is out. He was fat and
sick. I want to move on to a new diet, something with bread and pasta that also satisfies my
newly reinforced cynicism. All I need is someone to tell me it works. [email hidden]