When the Atkins diet first came to be, people marveled at how effective it was for an individual to lose weight. Many wondered as to how nobody had thought of it before, seeing as it’s a relatively simple concept, and there doesn’t seem too much to it. The reality of the matter however is far worse than that. Dr. Atkins, founder of the Atkins Diet, constructed his diet in such a way that he concluded carbohydrates to be the main source of food that allows you to build fat in your system. This is true-carbohydrates provide your body with its only source of glucose, which in turn is transferred into energy. Any such energy we don’t use can be converted into fat. Now, seeing as most people are lazy, it happens quite often that a diet high in carbohydrates can very easily be transferred into an unattractive amount of flesh growing where your stomach used to be. It would seem simple then, that cutting carbohydrates from your diet would inevitably solve your problem. The idea behind the diet is that cutting down carbohydrate intake to less than 20 grams per day, and replacing it with a diet made up primarily of proteins would help your system by allowing it to feed off of the fat that’s already in your system, and by this logic the weight loss should follow.The fatal (yes that’s right, fatal) flaw in the diet is the fact that the only source of glucose for most human beings comes from the type of food we call carbohydrates. Now this doesn’t seem like a big deal until you take into account that, among all the different types of sugars the body takes in from food, the only type the human brain can process to function on is glucose.Following this logic, a diet that asks you to restrict your carbohydrate intake is, in essence, asking you to starve your own brain of the essential nutrients it needs in order to function. As a result this leaves one engaging in a process that can potentially leave them mentally handicapped, severely malnourished, or even dead, though no one has died as of yet.Now as it seemed, Dr. Atkins covered this flaw in his diet by asking people not to completely sever their ties with carbohydrates, but rather restrict them to less than 20 grams per day. The only problem with that is the average diet is supposed to contain 285 grams of carbohydrates per day, based on a 2,000 calorie diet.That means that the Atkins diet is asking you to consume no more than seven percent of the normal amount of carbohydrates that you’re supposed to consume every single day. Add to this the information about glucose and you find your brain running on as little as seven percent of what fuel it needs.Can your car run if you only have seven percent of the tank filled up? Can a battery power anything with only seven percent of its energy remaining? Can you quench your thirst if you only have seven percent of a bottle of Pepsi? The answer to these questions is, “Probably not.”We can further add to this problem by taking into account the human factor of things-that human beings have tendencies to take things in excess. To the average person on the diet, if cutting down on carbohydrates is good, doing away with them would be better. The facts and the dangers are not a factor in most people’s thinking; the overall goal is to lose weight, to look good, and to be happy.If being a malnourished shadow of a person, living your days in a shattered and broken state, unable to truly know what is good for you or not makes you happy, then by all means, the Atkins diet is just right for you. However, should you prefer to remain among the sane and healthy, keeping a hold on your peace of mind and allowing your brain to process glucose, staying as far away from the Atkins diet is perhaps in the best interest of us all.