Despite erroneous claims from low carb bashers, a true Atkins or low carb diet promotes HEALTHY carb eating - broccoli and cauliflower - while keeping you from BAD carbs.

In fact, this quote is taken from the Atkins diet book:

"What's wrong with carbohydrates? If you mean what's wrong with a spear of broccoli or a bunch of spinach, the answer is nothing, they're magificent foods. When I speak negatively of carbohydrates, I'm referring to the unhealthy ones - those lurking in the sugar bowl and the bin of white flour, along with milk, white rice and proccessed and refined foods of all kinds. I also must include concentrates, such as fruit juices."

The problem with many "healthy diets" out there is that they say "eat fresh food! That'll help you lose weight!" And then people drink pineapple juice which is pretty much all sugar ... they eat canned corn which is very sugarry AND salty ... they eat white bread and white pasta which is about as nutritionally vacant as you can get. They eat tons of french fries with ketchup because "these are potatoes and tomatoes after all!" And these people wonder why they are gaining weight and having problems with vitamin deficiencies!

Just about any low carb diet book you pick up will tell you to eat HEALTHY carbohydrates. This is not about cutting out ALL carbohydrates. This is about choosing broccoli and cauliflower over pineapple juice and sweet corn. It's about choosing wheat bread over white bread.

Remember, fiber does NOT COUNT as a sugar-carb. So for those who say they won't get enough fiber - they obviously didn't read the books! All low carb diets *encourage* you to eat healthy amounts of fiber, because it is healthy for you! That doesn't affect your carb counts in the slightest.

Every day I eat a wide variety of vegetables and fish and chicken, I drink a lot of water, I eat my vitamins. I have healthy snacks like celery sticks. I am NOT hungry at all. At the end of each day, my carb total is around 40g. This isn't because I am "avoiding foods I want"!! This is because I am eating HEALTHY and it is what the total is. Do these high carb people want me to *add* sugar into my diet in order to meet their high totals of 200g or 300g of carbs in a day? Can anybody send me links to a study that tell me my body *needs* all of that excess sugar in it, just to meet some quota?

I'd love to read that study!