The Partnership for Essential Nutrition - a coalition of consumer, nutrition and public health groups - has responded to Atkins Nutritionals (ANI) announcement that it will provide nutritional information to major educational associations with a letter writing campaign demanding the immediate cancellation of this agreement.
Moreover, the coalition is calling on parents to flood the National Education Association (NEA) with individual protests.
Besides the NEA, other educational associations that have teamed up with Atkins are the New York State United Teachers, Public Schools for the 21st Century and the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE).
"Although the stated goal [of Atkins] is to combat childhood obesity, the real agenda is to continue to portray carbohydrates as the nutritional equivalent of snake oil and to target this information at children," said Barbara Moore, president of Shape Up America!, one of the groups involved in the coalition.
Dr. Moore also questioned the timing of this new agreement.
"I find it particularly insidious now when the company may be experiencing financial woes that it has begun to target school children," she said.
The partnership warned that on a nutritional level "there are very real dangers to children if they were to adopt a low carbohydrate diet because the brain requires 130 grams of glucose a day for normal functioning, a quantity of carbohydrates that even the maintenance level of the Atkins diet does not deliver."
However, Atkins Nutritionals says that its education policy initiative is designed to help combat the obesity epidemic currently facing the US and denies that there is any kind of marketing ploy involved in the campaign.
"Atkins Nutritionals does not market products to children, and we don't advocate that children follow the Atkins approach unless it is prescribed by their physician," said ANI's medical director, Dr. Stuart Trager.
He said that the information they are giving to education groups "focuses on some of Dr. Atkins' basic precepts: eating whole foods, whole grains, low glycemic fruits and vegetables, and a balance of healthy fats and protein sources while avoiding added sugars and trans fats, limiting high glycemic fruit and vegetables, and generally avoiding the so-called processed carbs".
"We aren't suggesting that parents require their children to follow the specific protocols of the Atkins nutritional approach," said Trager. "Simple steps like making sandwiches on whole grain bread, scaling back on sugary snacks and soda and encouraging a half-hour of exercise a day can keep children healthy and make a world of difference."
Dole Poll
Despite this enthusiasm for a partnership with Atkins from some Americans, half of US adults wouldn't touch the regime with a barge pole because they are worried about the potential negative health effects, according to a poll by the Dole Nutrition Institute.
According to the national poll, the possible side effects of a low-carbohydrate diet such as high cholesterol, constipation, kidney stones, and increased risk of some cancers, mean that 50 percent of Americans would steer clear of this diet.
"We've turned a corner in public awareness," said Jennifer Grossman, director of the Institute. "The more people learn about low- carb health risks, the less appetite they have for such dangerous fad diets."
Whatever the critics say, Atkins and more generally the low-carb trend, still has a fair amount of stream left in it yet. Despite a decline in SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) of no- or low-carb foods and drinks across the US in the last three months, decreasing from 633 SKUs in June, to 306 in July and 209 in August, this year has still seen the launch of a record number of low- and no-carb products, according to Productscan Online.
A mere 3.8 per cent of new food and beverage launches in the US in 2003 were no- or low-carb products (compared to a paltry 2.1 percent the year before). This year, the figure has jumped to a whopping 17.9 percent, meaning that 2585 products were placed on the supermarket shelves this year in comparison with 633 in 2003.