The Atkins Nutritional Approach:

The Atkins Nutritional Approach, popularly known as the Atkins Diet or just Atkins, is the most marketed and well-known of the low-carbohydrate diets. It was adopted by Dr. Robert Atkins (1930-2003) in the 1960's. After successfully treating over ten thousand patients, he popularized the Atkins diet in a series of books, starting with Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution in 1972. In his revised book, Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, Atkins updated some of his ideas, but remained faithful to the original concepts.

The Atkins Diet represents a radical departure from prevailing theories. Atkins claimed there are two main unrecognized factors about Western eating habits, arguing firstly that the main cause of obesity is eating refined carbohydrates particularly sugar, flour, and high-fructose corn syrups; and secondly, that saturated fat is overrated as a nutritional problem, and that only trans fats from sources such as hydrogenated oils need to be avoided.

Dr. Poon’s Metabolic Diet:

Dr. Poon created his three-phase metabolic diet to treat his patients’ medical problems that were secondary to their obesity. Dr. Poon found that after a 10% reduction in body weight, most of his patients’ medical problems became less severe, and were even eliminated, as proved the case especially in patients’ with metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, indigestion, gastroesophageal reflux, high serum triglycerides, high serum cholesterol, polycystic ovarian syndrome, fluid retention, sleep apnea, arthritis, and fibromyalgia. Dr. Poon is frequently asked by surgeons to help their patients to lose weight pre-operatively, in order to lower their peri-operative and post-operative morbidity and to decrease the chance of disease recurrence.

Dr. Poon’s Metabolic Diet is designed to shed stored body fat; particularly that carried around the waist, which is considered to constitute a risk factor for heart disease; while maintaining lean muscle mass.

The G.I. (Glycemic Index) Diet:

The Glycemic index is a ranking system for carbohydrates based on their immediate effect on blood glucose levels. The concept was invented by Dr. David J. Jenkins and colleagues in 1981 at the University of Toronto. The glycemic index of a food is defined by the area under the 2 hour blood glucose response curve (AUC) following the ingestion of a fixed portion of carbohydrate (usually 50 g).