La Vida Low Carb

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 1, 2004

Byline: RACHEL LEHMANN-HAUPT

Jim Capparell is chasing the new new thing, but this time it's not a high-tech trend. The Berkeley, California-based entrepreneur and former publisher of Mac Home Journal and PC Home Journal is making his next bet on low-carb food. In February, the first issue of Low Carb Living hit the newsstands for the ever-increasing number of devotees of Dr. Atkins and The South Beach Diet.

Capparell, who started out as a programmer for NASA in the late 1970s before following the personal computer boom into publishing, was considering a lifestyle magazine for baby boomers when he decided to lose an extra five pounds on a modified version of the Atkins diet. Impressed by the results, he realized that his diet might be a better business opportunity than his amorphous boomer book. "A little voice in me said that maybe a smaller bet would be better," he says.

Indeed, low-carb dieting has exploded in the past 18 months. Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution first hit the bestseller list in the 1970s, but in the past year, it has become a phenomenon. A cover story in The New York Times Magazine in 2002, a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine validating some of the Atkins claims, plus a bit of marketing magic, have pushed the low-carb diet past the pop-culture tipping point. Newsweek and Time have done lengthy features on the regimen, that promise to let Americans have their bacon, eggs and butter, and lose weight in the process. Now major restaurant chains such as TGI Fridays and Subway offer low carb products; supermarkets such as Wal-Mart and Kroger carry hundreds of low-carb choices, and both Michelob and Coors are peddling low-carb beer.

Some 59 million U.S. adults follow some kind of low-carb program, according to a December 2003 study by The Valen Group, a Cincinnati-based strategy consulting firm. And Atkins Nutritionals Inc., the company founded by Dr. Atkins, who died last year, had sales exceeding $100 million in 2003, according to Matthew Wiant, chief marketing officer. "We calculated that in 2003, low carb became a $15 billion market," says Dean Rotbart, the executive editor of LowCarbBiz magazine, a new trade. "I don't know how anyone can say that this is just a fad. The reality is that low fat is dead."

Capparell is plunging in headlong. Bootstrapping CappMedia Inc. with only "six figures" of his own money and little knowledge of the food industry, he took his virtual team from trademark to press in less than three months. Through Curtis Circulation, Capparell's company distributed 87,325 copies of the first issue to national newsstands. Advertisers include Unilever, Atkins and eDiets. In the first two weeks on the newsstands, Barnes & Noble reported a 52 percent sell-through. The plan is to publish 250,000 copies of the second issue.

The first issue of Low Carb Living has 80 pages of amateurish-looking design and stock photography and 20 pages of advertising. It includes a comparison of the Atkins and South Beach diets, recipes, advice and reviews. Future stories will cover obesity in children, the low-carb athlete, and good fats versus bad fats.

Capparell isn't the only entrepreneur bringing the low-carb craze to magazines. In May, Coincide Publishing, a Wisconsin-based publisher of specialty consumer magazines, will launch a 200,000-circ consumer book called Low Carb Energy that will be available on the newsstands and through subscription. "We're trying to be more high end than Low Carb Living, with more products, quality photography and fashion," says publisher Kyle Cox.

Established diet magazines aren't particularly fazed by either launch. "We've included carb awareness all along, so this is not new to us," says Chris Allen, vice president and publisher of Cooking Light, which has a circulation of 1.6 million. "These books are business ventures looking to capitalize on what's hot, although a lot of the indicators point to the the low-carb thing as having peaked already. Cooking Light is much more of a proven formula that is not based on deprivation but on moderation and balance."

Weight Watchers Magazine editors tend to agree. They really want to keep their 1.1 million readers educated without encouraging or discouraging one particular lifestyle, says editorial director Nancy Gagliardi. And there has been no marked increase in low-carb ads, just more mention of low carb in traditional ads, says ad director Chuck Bradley.

Catherine La Croix, Low Carb's editor-in-chief, believes that the long-term success of her magazine ultimately rests on promoting the idea that eating low carb is not simply a diet, but a whole lifestyle change. "There is no way that you're going to do Atkins for six months and then go back to the way you were six months earlier," she says. "It's not just a matter of weight loss, which is why the magazine is called Low Carb Living and not Low Carb Eating."