The atkins diet has never really been a favourite of mine. About 3 years before starting The Skinny Blog and embarking on my juice diet I tried Atkins and hated it.

I hated it mainly because I couldn't get in anywhere near the amount of veggies I wanted. This meant that my skin suffered badly, I have an olive complexion and so it was not the ideal diet for my skin. Then there were the headaches, the smell (you smell 'odd' to say the least) and the constant thirst that came with the increased levels of salt that are inevitable when you eat too much meat.

I blogged earlier last week that diets high in fat can lead to pancreatic cancer, this includes diets such as The Atkins Diet that are high in red meat intake.

Well today I found another BBC article that stated how Vegetarians are less likely to suffer from stomach, blood and bladder cancers! The study was based on 60,000 participants and was conducted in New Zealand and The UK.

This is another reason to try and squeeze in as much raw fruit and veg in to your diet and cut back on the meats! I honestly felt far more energised whilst juice dieting than compared to any other diet I had tried. That energy didn't go when I broke away from the juice diet and started my mediterranean diet, mainly because I kept at least once juice a day in.

So the myth that eating a mainly meat based diet is healthy can be dispelled!  Far more benefits come from steering your diet towards having more fruit and more veggies than meat, and with this British heat wave a diet with a variety of juices chucked in whether you are doing a full on juice or not will be very refreshing!