Ad Trends

Mostly related to fast food joints this time...

Anyone else been seeing ads from Burger King and Carl's Junior for their new bunless hamburgers that are "Atkin's Friendly"?

Three years ago if the mid-pubescent illiterate working the counter had handed you a burger without a bun, you'd have throttled him, at least until some of his pimples burst as the blood pressure in his head rose, blinding you.

Now it's suddenly a popular diet and people are going into these places buying them... They have to be or it would never have made it out of the test markets.

If someone has a weight problem, the kind that requires a diet... Then the obvious solution would be to... NOT EAT AT A FAST FOOD PLACE!

Aren't many of these same companies being sued by the parents of grossly obese teenage girls who ate there six times a day? Wasn't the almost automatic (and logical) defense against these lawsuits generally along the lines of "What kind of idiot would think pre-frozen, heat lamp thawed gut busters were healthy to start?"

The fact that they've been shown during sporting events makes it even worse... If I'm in a football mood, I don't want to hear the word "Diet" under any circumstances. It goes against the natural order of things. It's as bad as non-alchoholic beer ads or anything related to feminine hygene (Well... *almost* as bad as the last one, nothing is quite as bad as that).

Ahh..yes the Atkins diet. Subway is also on the list of "Atkins Friendly" menus. Hell,I can't go through the supermarket without seeing at least 20% of the products being advertised as "Atkns Friendly". What next,bottled water being advertised as "Atkins Friendly"? Just my observations.

Didn't Atkins die of heart disease? I suppose it couldn't possibly be from eating steak, bacon, eggs, and butter 5x a day.

nope.he died of a slip and fall.cracked his noggin.

Without going into all the technical details, the bottom line is that you can operate the human body on a less efficient fuel mix by dropping carbs and raising fat and protein. The effect of the less efficient fuel mix is appetite suppression and using up more fuel - eg, burning more calories. If you are a computer geek, you can think of it as overclocking your body. Works well, no negative health consequences unless you already have certain pre-existing health conditions.

Now the downside of Atkins and other low carb plans. It ain't magic. If you eat too damn many calories because you are pigging out on greasy burgers or low carb sweets all the time, you aren't going to lose any weight and you won't be getting the macronutrients you need for optimum health.

A ground beef patty on top of a salad is a fairly legitimate Atkins meal, but you really want to be eating more meals like salmon and steamed vegetables with hollandaise sauce, chicken breast with olive oil and broccoli, a small steak topped with blue cheese on a bed of roasted bell peppers and tomatoes, a big chef salad with hardboiled eggs and cheese and chopped turkey, things like that.

Part of the Atkins program specifically is exercise and plenty of good green vegetables, so the people who think that doing Atkins means eating nothing but bacon fried in butter are going to run themselves into serious trouble. Dietary fats from healthy sources are used intelligently on this diet, not overused.

The only things that Atkins really cuts out are things that we hominids evolved for millions of years very well without - mass amounts of refined white sugar and flour. Forensic evidence from archeological sites demonstrate that when grain becomes a staple of the diet, the population numbers go up but individual health and lifespan start deteriorating in very interesting ways.

My basic assumption is that it is better to feed an organism a reasonable analogue of what it evolved to eat in the wild. The closer you can get the better. While I'm not a fanatic about it, I have seen that I enjoy much better health when I do not eat very many overprocessed modern foods and stick to a diet more similar to that which my ancestors thrived on. That's pretty much a low carb diet. I don't do sugar and I rarely eat anything made with flour.

A lot of people have jumped on this particular bandwagon, and a lot of companies have decided to cash in on the idea. I suspect that these modern Atkins wannabes are missing the point of the whole program by relying on the newly available preprocessed low carb foods with a lot of commercial crap in them that are not necessarily healthy or conducive to weight loss, especially when they are overindulged.