For the life of me, I'm amazed at how often Atkins gets slammed for
supplements.  He really doesn't overemphasize them at all.  The amount of
supplements he recommends are -not- extreme in number, nor are they
megadose quantities, nor are they things you can't duplicate easily if you
don't want to buy them from him.

You only get into a zillion supplements with Atkins if you're having
specific problems that the diet itself doesn't address, or address
sufficiently.  Let's face it, your average 50 year old suffering from
hypertension and diabetes is a world away from a healthy 25 year old with
30 pounds to lose.  A lifetime of an abused body may need things that it
wouldn't have needed if it had been on a healthy diet its whole life.

So let's say you're having a problem and your diet hasn't fixed it.  Well
then maybe things like l-carnitine and coenzyme Q-10 and garlic and so on
and so forth are going to be things you want to examine -before you move on
to drugs-.

It is all well and good to suggest that if you just ate the perfect diet
all your ailments you wouldn't need any thing else.  Grant's already proven
to us that it don't work like that.  Grant's a severe diabetic with a lot
of complications and diet has helped him tremendously but if he gave up all
his supplements he'd probably be dead.  His system is obviously past the
point where diet alone is going to fix him up.

Some people have clearly reached the point where their problems are -not-
going to be fixed by diet alone, no matter how perfect that diet is.  This
describes I think a sad number of people in North America, where so many of
us have spent so many decades eating the wrong foods.

Much of one's attitude toward supplements will also be influenced by
whether or not you believe the claims that most farm soil, due to moern
production methods, have lost most of the minerals they used to have,
meaning we'll be deficient in these areas eating modern foods (including
cattle, who are fed on food grown in the same soil).

Of course, there's the opposite problem, namely that some supplements use
artificial, unnatural versions of vitamins, and use things like corn starch
as a binder.  :-(