NUTRIONISTS and dietary groups welcomed yesterday the saturated fat warning issued by promoters of the Atkins Diet as an essential move to prevent dietary imbalances and resulting health problems.

The advice from Atkins Nutritionals, the company that champions the high-fat, low-carbohydrate regime, gives warning that only 20 per cent of a dieter’s calories should come from saturated fat.

A spokesperson from the Food Standards Agency, a strong critic of low- carbohydrate diets, said that the decision was an important clarification in line with current thinking on dietary science.

“We have repeatedly said that it is all about a balanced diet,” she said. “Dieters should not be cutting any food group from their diet. It is about maintaining a balance — that is the key to a healthy diet. That means fruit and veg and bread and cereals, and less fats, salt and sugar.

“Fat has a part to play in a healthy diet, but it is an area that the majority of the British population need to be eating less of.”

The FSA issued a stern health warning to dieters four months ago over the dangers of low-carbohydrate regimes. Other organisations, including the British Dietetic Association and the British Nutrition Foundation, have voiced specific concerns about the Atkins Diet and questioned both its safety and efficacy.

Susan Jebb, of the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research Centre in Cambridge, said that the regime, in which dieters swap fruit, bread and pasta for steak and a full English breakfast, was based on pseudoscience and posed potential health risks.

She said that while the estimated two million Britons who had tried the diet might shed a few pounds at first, there was no scientific evidence that it was safe in the long term — or that the weight would stay off.

Atkins Nutritionals, the private company founded by Robert Atkins to promote his dietary revolution, has suffered a recent wave of bad publicity, which has been linked to cancer and heart, kidney and bone disorders.

It was also blamed for the death of Rachel Huskey, an American teenager who suffered a heart attack after losing 20lb in six weeks.

A spokeswoman for Atkins UK, the British arm of Atkins Nutritionals, said that the clarification was more a question of presenting the basic facts differently. “The whole idea is to reduce your carbohydrate, but it is not all about red meat,” she said. “Not all fats are bad for you, but, like anything, they should be taken in moderation. That’s what has not been 100 per cent clear before.”

Colette Heimowitz, director of research and education at Atkins Nutrionals, said last night that the move was to counter gross simplifications. “Atkins has always recommended a healthy balance of natural fats, saturated, poly and mono,” she said. “The media and opponents of Atkins often sensationalise and simplify the diet as the-all-the-steak-you-can-eat diet. This has never been true and the millions of followers who have read our books know this clearly.”

The diet came back into fashion early last year after two studies in the New England Journal of Medicine proclaimed it a success. The studies concluded that overweight people on the diet lost more weight than those on a conventional low-calorie diet. Atkins dieters also enjoyed higher levels of the good form of cholesterol.

The research reversed decades-old wisdom that the diet was unhealthy and prompted an explosion in its popularity. The book, Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, was a No 1 bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and celebrities, including Geri Halliwell and Brad Pitt, signed up in their scores.

In Atkins for Life, Dr Atkins’s latest book, published shortly before his death last year, the dietician advises readers to “always eat a balance of different types of fat”.

Atkins Nutritionals said that it had not specified the precise proportion of saturated and unsaturated fat because consumers tended to be put off by figures.

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