Atkins Diet Recipes

There are many delicious ways to get the protein and dietary fat you need while doing Atkins. In fact, plenty of people do Atkins without eating red meat or pork.

But before you decide to avoid red meat—or meat of any kind—ask yourself why. Abstaining for ethical or religious reasons is an understandable choice. It’s equally acceptable to eliminate meat from your diet because you simply don’t like the way it tastes. However, if you’re not eating meat because you’re worried about saturated fat and cholesterol, your concern may well be misplaced. As Dr. Atkins often explained, the cholesterol in your blood has very little to do with the fat and cholesterol you eat. You will lower your high-risk LDL cholesterol and total triglycerides far more effectively—and far more quickly—if you control carbohydrate consumption in general and avoid refined carbs in particular than if you avoid animal foods that contain cholesterol. In fact, lowering your dietary cholesterol intake has been shown time and again to have virtually no effect on the amount of cholesterol in your bloodstream.

One option is strongly recommended: fish—preferably oily or cold-water fish such as tuna, salmon, sardines, bluefish, mullet and anchovies—which you should eat at least once or twice a week. Why? Because fish is not only high in protein and low in carbs, it contains omega-3 fatty acids—the best kind of dietary fat of all. This is the dietary fat that, among other benefits, helps protect you against sudden death from heart attack, cardiac arrhythmias and stroke. Delicious and low in carbs as they are, lobster, shrimp and other shellfish are lower in omega-3s than other fish. You can definitely enjoy them as alternatives to red meat, but they don’t count as substitutes for your two weekly fish meals.

Chicken and turkey make excellent alternatives to red meat. The trick here is to be sure you’re getting real chicken and turkey and not a processed food that contains hidden carbohydrates. Those popular chicken nuggets, for instance, are particularly dangerous. Not only do they contain carbohydrate fillers, they’re dipped in batter full of carbs and then deep-fried in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. These foods carry a dangerous triple whammy: a double dose of carbs plus health-damaging trans fats. Many if not most prepared chicken products, such as frozen dinners, are made with processed chicken meat that may well contain hidden carbs. As always, read all package labels carefully.