On The A-List

Dr. Fred Pescatore’s new book, The A-List Diet, is a roadmap to doing low-carb right—and transforming your health.

- Jonny Bowden

Fred Pescatore was the last doctor in the world you’d expect to be a low-carb guru. “I hated medicine,” he says. “I truly hated my residency. I hated the fact that people just went to the hospital to get sick and die. All I was doing was writing prescriptions. I had no time to talk to patients.”

This is back in the era when patients were passive, and doctors were considered infallible. The doctor designed the treatment, prescribed the medication, and the patient followed orders. Pescatore hated it.

That all changed when, fresh out of residency, he took his first job … with Dr. Robert Atkins. Yes, that Atkins. “I was just waiting for my California medical license to come through, so I thought “‘OK, I’ll do this for a while until I get my first real job,’” Pescatore recalls. “I didn’t even know that much about who he was and what he was about.”

Pescatore began to read The New Diet Revolution, the book that introduced the very low-carb Atkins diet to the world. “It all started to make sense,” he says. “But what really convinced me was the results—people started to get well. They not only lost weight, but their diabetes went away, their metabolic syndrome went away, their triglyceride levels went down, their HDL went up, and their blood pressure got lower. People just got healthier, and it was strictly a matter of changing how they ate.”