So they're attacking the Atkins Diet in an effort to get this "fad" out of the picture and, hopefully, get people to return to their old disease-promoting eating habits that include white bread, soft drinks, added sugars, lots of pasta, and so on. See, it's really a war over profits, not over your health.
The funny thing is that foes of the Atkins Diet have a few good points: eating unlimited quantities of saturated fat in products like bacon and cheese is terrible nutritional advice. But the Atkins Food Guide Pyramid doesn't really recommend that in the first place. The Atkins Food Guide Pyramid, in fact, is the healthiest food guide I've seen yet: it's far healthier than the USDA Food Guide Pyramid, which seems to serve as little more than a marketing brochure for grain farmers.
But I agree that the Atkins Diet can be extremely unhealthy when abused by people who are just looking for a magic bullet solution rather than making the more responsible decision to choose healthful foods for the rest of their lives. That's why I literally wrote the book on the dangers of the Atkins Diet: Low-Carb Diet Warning, which you can read free of charge.
The answer to all this, by the way, is that both groups are right: Atkins is right about avoiding processed carbohydrates and refined sugars. Opponents are right about avoiding unlimited quantities of saturated animal fat. So what's the final answer? Eat unrefined foods only. Avoid all processed foods, and you'll be healthy. I call it the Unrefined Foods Diet, and it's the only diet that really keeps you healthy. Food manufacturers, of course, hate it, since the Unrefined Foods Diet demands that you purchase and consume absolutely no manufactured or processed foods whatsoever, and that's exactly where the profits are generated by food manufacturers.