A committee representing the Union of Dietary Historians has released a statement defending the safety of the Atkins diet, claiming that such a diet is both older and safer than many may realize.
The Atkins diet has been labeled unsafe by many critics, and boring by others. No part of the diet has been more controversial than Induction, or Phase I of the diet, in which the dieter is limited to no more than twenty grams of carbohydrate daily. Induction dieters often experiment with what have been called "meat fasts."
"Meat fasts in particular have been used by many societies worldwide," the statement reads in part. "Meat fasts, and diets featuring meat fasts, are known from every inhabited continent. The Aztecs used to celebrate with meat fasts, and many of the tribes of the American Southwest participated in them."
Nor was it just the indigenous peoples, the committee continues: for example, the twelve surviving members of the American frontier's Donner party spent the winter of 1846-1847 on a meat fast in the Sierra Madre, and some of them lived well into their seventies.
The committee also points to a more recent study, in which 16 members of a Uruguayan football team, surviving a plane crash in the Andes, conducted a meat fast for approximately ten weeks.
Meat fasts, then, would seem to have the historian's seal of approval.
After the statement was released, several local chapters of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals provisionally dropped their opposition to the Atkins diet.