Another thing - while a lot of people call a low-carb diet an "Atkins' Diet", I've always cringed at the term. I don't like anything branded like that, seems faddish, for one. But, in addition, I've known for a while that the low-carb diet was what people considered simple common-sense dietary choices, up until the 1970s.
If you read old books, old cooking books particularly (I do), you'll notice that they usually warn you off of starches and sugars, specifically - calling them "the real killers" and "fatty degenerators" and silly 1920 things like that. These books contain recipes for, I don't know, sauteed Foie Gras (not really), so they're obviously not diet books, yet they still recommend not eating many starches or sugars.
In the NY Times Magazine article I'm going to link to below it's mentioned people used to think that the reason there were a lot of fat Italians was because they ate so much pasta, and not much meat.
Anyways, the whole idea of the Atkins'/low-carb diet being a fad diet in concept is kind of laughable, because for the longest time, the principles of the diet (good food makes you eat less, sugar and starch make you fat and hungry) were the rules that guided what mothers cooked for their kids and so on.
Low-Carb Article from the New York Times
Stone