The History of South Beach Diet

The South Beach Diet is a popular diet used by many people to lose excess weight and adopt a healthier lifestyle. The diet focuses on avoiding sugar found in many common, heavily processed American foods.

Features

The South Beach Diet emphasizes the importance of recognizing "good" carbs and "bad" carbs. Bad carbs are carbohydrates which consist of mostly sugar and provide little nutritional value to the body. Good carbs are those containing whole grains and carbs found naturally in vegetables.

Founder

The South Beach Diet was developed in Miami by the cardiologist Arthur Agatston, M.D.. Dr. Agatston is also an associate professor of medicine at the University of Miami School of Medicine.

Significance

Dr. Agatston devised the South Beach Diet after watching his patients struggle to control their weight using the low-fat diet guidelines suggested by the American Heart Association. He found that patients were unable to stick to low-fat diets over a long period of time and would end up gaining the weight back. The South Beach Diet was created as a solution to this problem.

Time Frame

Dr. Agatston developed the South Beach Diet in the early 1990s. This diet become popular when his first book, "The South Beach Diet," was published in 2003.

Benefits

This diet claims to provide people with a long-term weight control solution through a lifestyle change, rather than a series of short-term diets. According to the American Heart Association, maintaining healthy weight lowers the risk of heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer.