Dr Atkins does politics much better than any of the politicians
No, we're not talking about John Kerry. Or President George W Bush. Or any other politician. Just an old doctor who lost his footing on an icy footpath, knocked himself unconscious and died. An old doctor named Robert Atkins.
Bill Gates is one illustration of how power and influence affecting the daily lives of millions no longer resides with politicians or at least not solely with politicians. The late Robert Atkins is another.
Everybody's agin him. Except, of course, those currently on his diet. Last week, a university study in the US established that wait for it 51 million people in America are now watching carbohydrates, rather than calories, thanks to the good (dead) doctor. There's a good chance that figure could be matched in the rest of the world.
To change the daily habits of one million people may be regarded as an achievement. To change the daily habits of a hundred million people is a phenomenon.
It was to that phenomenon the BBC brought its investigative powers in the last few days, doing research and lining up nutritionists to prove there's no magic fat-burning factor in the Atkins diet and that the only reason it works is that its adherents reduce their calorie intake.
So there.
Nutritionists are like Victorian moralists. They stand, to a man and a woman, for moderation in all things. They promote the balanced diet and the food pyramid and lie in the long grass waiting to kill off any emerging alternative. The minute any new diet becomes popular, sure as shootin', a nutritionist will come out of the woodwork warning that its users will get deficiencies of some vital nutrient. Or that their weight loss is really water.
By so doing, of course, they give endless publicity to the diet in question. Especially if the diet has a strong brand. Professors and lecturers have lined up in droves to attack Atkins, for example, failing to observe the most fundamental truth of modern media, which is that by attacking a brand they draw more attention to it and absolutely ensure their own anonymity. Lots of people are currently on Atkins because they heard it being criticised by some nutritionist whose name they forget.
Nutritionists attacking this particular diet have also tended as demonstrated by the BBC programme to miss another pivotal point. We do lots of things for our health without knowing why precisely they work. When Dr John Snow ended a cholera epidemic in England in the eighteenth century by taking the handle off one pump in the city and forcing people to get their water from another pump, he didn't know the mechanism of infection. He just observed that people using Pump A died. So he stopped them. Similarly, people who find they stop being fat on Atkins don't much care if it's because they're eating fewer calories, rather than activating a magic fat-burning process. They're happy to be on a diet that allows them to stuff themselves with eggs, fish and beef yet get thinner.
The importance of beef to the diet is why the American beef industry, which got bitten by a dead mad cow over Christmas, is so grateful to Atkins. Although big foreign markets for American beef, including Japan, have lowered the boom on imports, the home market has stayed much firmer than might have been expected, and it's acknowledged that a major factor has been the power of the diet branded with a big capital A.
Of course, if your product is explicitly excluded from that diet, it's a very different kettle of pasta. Which is why Mayor Bloomberg of New York was stuffing his face with spaghetti for a photo opportunity on Friday. So rattled was the mayor by the overwhelming power of the anti-pasta Atkins regimen that he lost the discretion every politician should demonstrate in a room full of microphones. Making the fatal assumption that the mikes were off, Bloomberg cast doubts on the story of Robert Atkins' death, implying, instead, that the doctor might have died of his own diet.
"I mean," Bloomberg said, "the guy was fat!"
The dead man's widow promptly went on nationwide TV to replay in emotional detail the circumstances of her husband's demise, defend and promote his work and demand an apology from Bloomberg. Whichever PR company had the idea of using Bloomberg to attack the ubiquitous diet must be kicking themselves, because he not only gave it more publicity for it, but persuaded many that its opponents must be badly off for evidence if they need to peddle a conspiracy theory about how an old doctor died.
OUTDOING the pasta manufacturers, Florida Citrus Growers have stuck nearly $2 million into a PR campaign to attack the diet because it's doing their business such damage. Atkins essentially advises to forget orange juice.
What has been, up to now, seen as the definitive health drink is full of sugar, ergo full of carbohydrates. Get your vitamin C from a pill, says Atkins, and if you're at the stage of the diet where fruit sneaks back in, eat a whole orange, which at least will deliver a little fibre.
So the dieters who are keeping the cow-makers happy are bankrupting the orange-growers. Who, in turn, are going down the old path trod so unproductively for several years by well-meaning nutritionists who know a great deal about nutrients and damn all about changing the way people think and act.
The big danger the orange-growers seem to be choosing to warn against is gout. Now, students of medical history (of whom there aren't many) or students of eighteenth century cartoons (of whom there aren't that many more) know all about gout. But for the majority of the overweight people currently considering a diet, gout is a new and not very interesting term. They're not going to be scared by the vague potential of a threat they've never heard of.
In years to come, this economy-rattling controversy should serve as a scary example of where conviction and money can together be hugely counter-productive. The combination is causing the anti-Atkins interests to communicate in ways which can have only a negative payoff for them.
The Atkins people, on the other hand, have worked out that the way to reach their target audience is not by press release, but by cheap paperbacks, updated each year.
In those paperbacks, they pick off every argument made against the diet, provide chapter and verse to prove that argument wrong, and invite the reader to bring the book to their GP, thus turning the dieter into an advocate. They're playing a blinder. On all fronts.
Next time the urge comes on an Irish political party to import overseas vote-getting expertise, they should ignore Republicans or Democrat advisors and go instead for the Atkins people.
If they can change the beliefs and behaviour of a hundred million people in several different continents, they're doing politics better than most politicians.
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