How many times have you told someone you were on a low-carb diet or how many times have you suggested a low-carb diet to a friend or relative that was trying to lose weight or improve health and got the following response?: Oh, I couldn't do that. I wouldn't want to eat that much meat and all those eggs.

If you're like me, you hear it all the time. I can't recall how many times a TV talking head or a radio DJ asked MD and/or me that very thing on live TV/radio. Somehow the great unwashed masses have it in their heads that a low-carb diet is nothing but meat, meat and more meat with a little butter and cheese thrown in for good measure. It doesn't matter how many times MD and I (and others) make the case on national or local TV and radio, no one seems to listen.

Now comes a study in Nutrition Journal that gives the lie to the low-carb-diets-are-all-meat notion.

Researchers provided questionnaires to a subset of members of the Active Low-Carber's Forum (ALCF) — an online support group started in 2000 that currently has more than 86,000 members — requesting information about their history of weight loss using the low-carb diet. An analysis of the data reveals that

the membership of ALCF is currently 83% women, which is reflected in the makeup of respondents to the questionnaire. The age distribution showed 61% of respondents between 30 and 49 years of age. We did not request physical data on the questionnaire but asked for goals in weight loss. the responses indicate that the starting weights must have been very high with more than half of the people surveyed indicating that they had wanted to lose more than 50 pounds and 22% intending to lose 100 obs or more. In summary, the survey population was largely middle aged women whose goal was to lose a large amount of body mass.