This is a fascinating story. The diet wars pit Carbs vs. Fats and Carbs vs. Calories. It's really Atkins vs. the low-fat medical establishment. But, in fact, these wars have been refined and micro-analyzed to the point that they now pit "Bad Carbs" vs. "Good Carbs" and "Bad Fats" vs. "Good Fats."

Each group has added new buzzwords to the argument, further confusing an already confused population. What are these words? For the low-fat group, the buzzwords are healthy fats vs. unhealthy fats: the so-called evil, saturated, animal fats vs. the so-called good fats (like olive oils, canola oil, etc.). This idea is strongly championed by the Harvard epidemiologist, Dr. Walter Willet, who lurks behind the greatest scam in medicine: bad "science's" notion that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease.

It's not my task in this piece to expose and settle that controversy. Just go to your favorite search engine and type in "cholesterol myths"; you'll get enough to keep you busy for a lifetime.

My intent, here, is to destroy the low-carb supporters' argument concerning impact carbs (IC) and non-impact carbs (NIC).

In the two years before Atkins's death, aggressive marketers turned his enterprise into a multi-million dollar food empire.

Since I'd quit following what was going on out there in the "industry" after I printed my book (I didn't think there was anything new to learn), I missed the twists and turns, the deceit and lies, that these people were conjuring up so as to fit their round peg into a square hole.

I knew the FDA controlled labeling, but I had no sense of the extent to which these venal marketing people would go in order to get around the laws, and to confuse the public for more profits.

The basis of Atkins (and, all the other makers of low-carb foods and food bars) is that it's all about the negative impact of glucose and insulin: about the "spike" of glucose and insulin that occurs from eating carbohydrate-containing foods. The question that begs an answer once the statement is made that it's all about glucose and insulin is: "So what?" But, there's never an answer forthcoming.

Different carbs do, however, give different responses in terms of how high blood glucose and insulin rise. But it's far more complicated than this; the "spike" in glucose and insulin has little to do with how the body disposes of a particular source of calories or fuel. It's glucose itself, the total amount that one is exposed to during the day, that sets the stage for all the body processes used to dispose of glucose. Insulin only stimulates the direct effects caused by glucose; glucose is the key substance causing changes.

Further, the argument offered by the IC/NIC Scam artists, says that refined carbs are bad and that unrefined ones aren't. This argument is premised on the notion that refined carbs digest quickly and increase glucose and insulin. As I show in my big, encyclopedic-edition, Ultimate Diet Secrets, this is simply not true; the glycemic index (a measure of the rise in blood glucose) for refined foods and their non-refined counterparts is exactly the same.

The new boys at Atkins didn't like his unwavering hard-line about meat, meat, and more meat, intent as the new group is today to be "PC" and middle-of-the-road. Their latest position appears to be that they've pretty much put Atkins's teachings out to pasture.