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Dr. Atkins' Age Defying Diet - Feel Great, Live Longer
Millions of people around the world rely on Dr. Atkins' groundbreaking dietary advice-his amazing New Diet Revolution has topped the New York Times bestseller list for nearly four years! Now he offers the next step in health improvement-a powerful, anti-aging program utilizing his innovative dietary ideas, combined with the latest research on exercise, vitamins, herbs, hormones, and other supplements. This safe, easy-to-follow regimen not only fights age-related illnesses like heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and diabetes, but dramatically improves the way we look and feel as we age. In this indispensable age-defying guide, Dr. Atkins - How a low-carb, high-protein diet-rich in both natural and supplementary antioxidants-can significantly boost your immunity
- Effective ways to decrease free radicals and increase blood flow to the brain-the key to enhancing mental functioning and memory
- How to stabilize blood sugar levels to greatly reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and adult-onset diabetes
- Why hormones keep us young-and how to prevent hormone decline that comes with aging
- Essential ways to cleanse your body of harmful bacteria and other toxins
- And many other ways to stay healthy, fit, energetic, and young!
- Effective ways to decrease free radicals and increase blood flow to the brain-the key to enhancing mental functioning and memory
- How to stabilize blood sugar levels to greatly reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and adult-onset diabetes
- Why hormones keep us young-and how to prevent hormone decline that comes with aging
- Essential ways to cleanse your body of harmful bacteria and other toxins
- And many other ways to stay healthy, fit, energetic, and young!
- GenresHealth
Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
About the author
Robert C. Atkins
128 books30 followersRobert Coleman Atkins, MD was an American physician and cardiologist, best known for the Atkins Nutritional Approach (or "Atkins Diet"), a popular but controversial way of dieting that entails eating low-carbohydrate and high-protein foods, in addition to leaf vegetables and dietary supplements.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 16, 2024
Life-changing, an absolute must-read.
July 11, 2019
Offers valuable information on how to eat properly, especially for seniors
For someone who was brought up believing that the way to dietary health and happiness was to avoid red meat, eggs, butter and saturated fats, and to load up on complex carbohydrates and use margarine, Dr. Atkins' ideas are indeed a revolution. In an incisive and extremely confident style, Dr. Atkins sets out what he believes are the components of a healthy diet for those of us past, say, fifty. First, "eat foods low in carbohydrates and high in antioxidants" (p. 277). These would be especially vegetables like kale, carrots, spinach, broccoli, etc. Second, eat natural fats and oils from butter, meat, fish, eggs, nuts and olive oil, and avoid all "trans fats" or highly processed fats in general. In fact, avoid highly processed foods of all kinds. Third, supplement your diet with what he calls "vitanutrients," i.e., vitamins like A, B, C, E etc. and minerals like zinc, calcium, etc., hormones like DHEA and melatonin, etc., and food supplements like ginseng, ginkgo biloba, etc.
Atkins himself is a medical doctor who practices alternative and complementary medicine. He is an enterprise himself with his many best-selling books and his Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine. When I first heard about him and his all protein and vegetable diet some years ago, I figured he was the charlatan author of yet another fad diet, and I ignored his books. This one is the first I've actually read, and I must say immediately that he is certainly not a charlatan. He is obviously a man who knows as much about diet as anyone could hope to know. Whether he is entirely correct in his ideas is not something I am capable of assessing; but I am willing to bet he is mostly right. He has had an enormous experience treating patients, and it is encouraging to note that as a medical doctor he tends to write relatively few prescriptions. He even warns of the harm that can come from the use of commonly prescribed medicines and their side effects.
The most important claim he makes about ageing is that it is primarily caused by free radicals and that a diet high in antioxidants can reduce the number of free radicals in our bodies.
His central idea about diet is that it is not fats that are the enemy of health for people in the industrialized world (as we have so long been taught) but carbohydrates, especially highly processed ones. This is indeed a revolutionary idea, or at least it was when it was first expressed some years ago. Fat people are not fat because they eat too much fat. They are fat because they eat too many carbohydrates. When you think about it, especially from the point of view of evolutionary biology it suddenly makes enormous sense. What was it in the prehistory that we humans never had enough of to overindulge on? Not meat, and for many cultures, not fat, but carbohydrates. There were no fields of amber grain waiting to be harvested and made into flour and bread. There were no rice patties or acres of potatoes. Humans could fell a mammoth or an elephant seal once in a while and load up on meat and fat until they were sick of it, but there is no way they could have eaten enough wild wheat or barley to get sick of it. The sheer caloric expense of harvesting low-yield natural grains by hand prohibited any overdosing. It wasn't until the rise of agriculture about ten thousand years ago that we ever had enough of a carbohydrate to call it a staple of diet. Consequently, we are to some extent carbohydrate intolerant. This is an idea absent from popular books on nutrition twenty years ago, but a staple of the wisdom today.
I like the way Atkins explains how we came to this delusive state of dietary affairs in the first place, and how that delusion is maintained. The culprits are the mainstream medical establishment and the U.S. government working hand in hand to further the interests of vast agribusiness corporations who want to maintain a high public consumption of trans fats and highly refined carbohydrates. When you think about this, it also makes sense.
I also like how specific Atkins is. He names the foods and the vitanutrients and gives the amounts. He tells you how to work with your doctor (who, alas, may not be up on all the latest information) to put together a program for your specific needs. If nothing else, by reading this book you'll know how to ask some tough questions about diet and health that your doctor will have to respond to.
Agreeable too is the sardonic tone he takes with the medical establishment. For example on page 194 we find, "...Vitamin E enhances immunity. This has been a well-known fact among complementary practitioners for years, but perhaps now the information will trickle down to mainstream medicine, where this sort of knowledge is badly needed."
However, although the text is as readable as one would expect a popular book to be, especially with all the unavoidable abbreviations and acronym-filled detail, there is more than a little repetition. Additionally, Atkins and his assisting writer, Sheila Buff, have an annoying (to me) habit of beginning a chapter by telling the reader what they're going to say, saying it, and then telling the reader what they've said. On the other hand, that might be good; and anyway, who am I to second guess someone who has reached as many people with his books as has Dr. Atkins?
--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
For someone who was brought up believing that the way to dietary health and happiness was to avoid red meat, eggs, butter and saturated fats, and to load up on complex carbohydrates and use margarine, Dr. Atkins' ideas are indeed a revolution. In an incisive and extremely confident style, Dr. Atkins sets out what he believes are the components of a healthy diet for those of us past, say, fifty. First, "eat foods low in carbohydrates and high in antioxidants" (p. 277). These would be especially vegetables like kale, carrots, spinach, broccoli, etc. Second, eat natural fats and oils from butter, meat, fish, eggs, nuts and olive oil, and avoid all "trans fats" or highly processed fats in general. In fact, avoid highly processed foods of all kinds. Third, supplement your diet with what he calls "vitanutrients," i.e., vitamins like A, B, C, E etc. and minerals like zinc, calcium, etc., hormones like DHEA and melatonin, etc., and food supplements like ginseng, ginkgo biloba, etc.
Atkins himself is a medical doctor who practices alternative and complementary medicine. He is an enterprise himself with his many best-selling books and his Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine. When I first heard about him and his all protein and vegetable diet some years ago, I figured he was the charlatan author of yet another fad diet, and I ignored his books. This one is the first I've actually read, and I must say immediately that he is certainly not a charlatan. He is obviously a man who knows as much about diet as anyone could hope to know. Whether he is entirely correct in his ideas is not something I am capable of assessing; but I am willing to bet he is mostly right. He has had an enormous experience treating patients, and it is encouraging to note that as a medical doctor he tends to write relatively few prescriptions. He even warns of the harm that can come from the use of commonly prescribed medicines and their side effects.
The most important claim he makes about ageing is that it is primarily caused by free radicals and that a diet high in antioxidants can reduce the number of free radicals in our bodies.
His central idea about diet is that it is not fats that are the enemy of health for people in the industrialized world (as we have so long been taught) but carbohydrates, especially highly processed ones. This is indeed a revolutionary idea, or at least it was when it was first expressed some years ago. Fat people are not fat because they eat too much fat. They are fat because they eat too many carbohydrates. When you think about it, especially from the point of view of evolutionary biology it suddenly makes enormous sense. What was it in the prehistory that we humans never had enough of to overindulge on? Not meat, and for many cultures, not fat, but carbohydrates. There were no fields of amber grain waiting to be harvested and made into flour and bread. There were no rice patties or acres of potatoes. Humans could fell a mammoth or an elephant seal once in a while and load up on meat and fat until they were sick of it, but there is no way they could have eaten enough wild wheat or barley to get sick of it. The sheer caloric expense of harvesting low-yield natural grains by hand prohibited any overdosing. It wasn't until the rise of agriculture about ten thousand years ago that we ever had enough of a carbohydrate to call it a staple of diet. Consequently, we are to some extent carbohydrate intolerant. This is an idea absent from popular books on nutrition twenty years ago, but a staple of the wisdom today.
I like the way Atkins explains how we came to this delusive state of dietary affairs in the first place, and how that delusion is maintained. The culprits are the mainstream medical establishment and the U.S. government working hand in hand to further the interests of vast agribusiness corporations who want to maintain a high public consumption of trans fats and highly refined carbohydrates. When you think about this, it also makes sense.
I also like how specific Atkins is. He names the foods and the vitanutrients and gives the amounts. He tells you how to work with your doctor (who, alas, may not be up on all the latest information) to put together a program for your specific needs. If nothing else, by reading this book you'll know how to ask some tough questions about diet and health that your doctor will have to respond to.
Agreeable too is the sardonic tone he takes with the medical establishment. For example on page 194 we find, "...Vitamin E enhances immunity. This has been a well-known fact among complementary practitioners for years, but perhaps now the information will trickle down to mainstream medicine, where this sort of knowledge is badly needed."
However, although the text is as readable as one would expect a popular book to be, especially with all the unavoidable abbreviations and acronym-filled detail, there is more than a little repetition. Additionally, Atkins and his assisting writer, Sheila Buff, have an annoying (to me) habit of beginning a chapter by telling the reader what they're going to say, saying it, and then telling the reader what they've said. On the other hand, that might be good; and anyway, who am I to second guess someone who has reached as many people with his books as has Dr. Atkins?
--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
February 28, 2025
Dr. Atkins was way ahead of his time, and I want to be clear this book does contain valid diet information (25 years after it was written). There are better options though for reading about his plan (try his more basic book Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution instead). Unless you have a deep interest in the details of vitamin and nutrient needs for seniors, just read section V (chapters 20-23). That gives you all you really need to know. The rest is a lot (A LOT) of deep detail about disease and health data those outside the medical or science community likely don't care about. Even as a Registered Dietitian, whose career is understanding vitamins and minerals and feeding senior citizens, I scanned some sections. It is way too much information for the average consumer to absorb.
July 21, 2015
This is truly one of the best books I've red about health, nutrition and anti-aging.
I was a vegetarian for many years with considerable side effects on my health and energy levels. After reading many books on health and having many prejudices against the Atkin's Diet I gave it a try. What a shame they have besmirched this genius, Dr. Atkins so much! Following this way of nutrition I felt for the first time in many years that my energy levels and blood works returning to normal.
This book though is not about his diet (not solely) but about supplements we need to keep on growing young. I've been implementing many of the tips he gives in this book already and will add his recommended vitranutrients and enzymes to my diet. I know from experience that his insights are vital..
I was a vegetarian for many years with considerable side effects on my health and energy levels. After reading many books on health and having many prejudices against the Atkin's Diet I gave it a try. What a shame they have besmirched this genius, Dr. Atkins so much! Following this way of nutrition I felt for the first time in many years that my energy levels and blood works returning to normal.
This book though is not about his diet (not solely) but about supplements we need to keep on growing young. I've been implementing many of the tips he gives in this book already and will add his recommended vitranutrients and enzymes to my diet. I know from experience that his insights are vital..
September 23, 2007
The late Dr. Atkins was ahead of the curve where he focusses on the proactive method to good health. This work is similar to his other one on vitanutrients but with a focus on defying age.
October 12, 2008
Great info on how people become diabetic, get heart disease, and good steps to prevent.
June 15, 2013
I'm learning a lot about how vitamin c and even will help with my asthma!
There are a lot of vitamin supplements I can increase to help with my immunity problems.
There are a lot of vitamin supplements I can increase to help with my immunity problems.
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April 21, 2019I have the german edition.
June 23, 2024
This is very helpful if you need to improve your health. I read bits and pieces of it and purchased some new supplements.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews