South Beach Diet

The Popularity of the South Beach Diet

The South Beach Diet is a popular way to lose weight that has been adopted by millions. The original intent of the diet was to address the issue of heart disease in patients. Dr. Arthur Agatston, a cardiologist, teamed up with dietician Marie Almon to create the diet.

The website for the South Beach Diet, southbeachdiet.com, offers a free diet profile to assess how someone can use the diet to achieve their personal target weight. After skipping through several advertisements you arrive at a body mass index number.

The diet was originally designed to be an alternative to fad diets such as the Pritikin Diet, which focused on reducing fat consumption in a person's diet regimen. This alternative focused on giving the patients a diet they would actually adhere to instead of the recommended heart healthy and glucose controlling diets.

The key to the South Beach Diet is the failure of diets such as Pritikin's. The low fat diets did not work because what fat calories the patient did not consume were made up by eating more non-fatty foods. The number of calories consumed did not remain the same because patients would get hungry and eat more than they usually did.

Agatston opted for a new approach - simplicity. He divided carbohydrates and fats into two categories: bad and good. Good carbohydrates are those that have not been heavily refined in the manufacturing process. The more natural, the better is the practice. Regarding good fat, lean red meat and food that contains large amounts of Omega-3 fatty acids are to be preferred over fat commonly found in foods such as trans-fats and saturated fat. The focus switches from how much a patient eats to what he eats.

The diet is not without its restrictions. Common foods such as potatoes, pasta, bread, and cereal are discouraged. Naturally, practitioners of the diet are not allowed to eat as much as they want either. The theory is that the diets of Americans are too steeped in eating high carbohydrate foods, such as pizza, and in order to achieve weight loss the number of overall carbs in a person's diet must be reduced. A balance must be achieved to effectively and permanently lose weight.

At the center of the diet is the development of the Glycemic Index (GI) developed by Canadian doctor David Jenkins. The index basically measures how fast a food is absorbed into the bloodstream, raising the patient's blood sugar level. Foods that cause an immediate rise in glucose levels get a high GI rating. This parallels the South Beach Diet approach that it is what you eat that is more important than how much.

The "South Beach Diet" book was published and sold millions of copies. The book and the diet came under criticism from the medical community for making unsubstantiated claims about the effects of the diet and the lack of supporting scientific evidence. One of the critics, diabetic researcher Dr. Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, rejected the concept of the Glycemic Index altogether. Another critic, Dr. Joseph Mercola, claims that the basis of the diet is entirely wrong; that the food alternatives contain more than a small degree of risk and the approach to reduced fats is misleading.

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