Bacon, Swiss, chicken and ranch dressing, oozing out of a wrap.

You call this health food?

Subway does.

“Fried pork rinds sprinkled with BBQ seasoning. A carb-counter’s delight!” This from the “Smart Eating” portion of Ruby Tuesday’s Web site.

Do you want fries with that? At Burger King, you can have a salad instead with your bunless Whopper.

Suddenly, bread is bad and bacon is good. Fat isn’t the enemy – pasta is. Low-carbohydrate diets are here to stay, and they’re changing the way we shop for, order and think about food.

Just ask Carmen Montes of Montes International Catering, a popular takeout spot in Bangor. Every day, people call to see if she has a low-carb menu. Customers want to know how many grams of net carbohydrate are in her wraps. At dinnertime, they order tenderloin to go – no potatoes. Banquet clients request cream sauce made without flour.

“We’re not dietitians, we’re chefs,” Montes said after a recent lunch rush. “For us to fit everybody’s lifestyle, we can’t go with the flow of what the new fad diet is.”

She started to notice the low-carb diet trend about six months ago – first Atkins, then South Beach. It came to a head around the holidays, when special requests and substitutions added frustration to an already hectic time of year.

Montes looked into the diets, but found the nutritional requirements overwhelming. After a conversation with her son, she decided it would be best to keep their core dishes and offer a range of sides, and the “Create Your Own Darn Meal” menu was born.

“[Low-carb] is a lifestyle, and I can’t study everyone’s lifestyle,” Montes said. “I wanted to try to accommodate more people without trying to study it.”

But chain restaurants and grocers have studied it and tailored their offerings to appeal to the 1 in 7 Americans on some form of restricted-carbohydrate diet: Atkins, South Beach, The Zone or a variation thereof. A September 2003 Harris poll found that 32 million people nationwide have jumped on the high-protein bandwagon.

Subway and TGI Friday’s have since supplemented their menus with Atkins-endorsed wraps and entrees. Ruby Tuesday shied away from a diet affiliation, but in November, the chain introduced its Smart Eating menu, with 30 low-carb options.

“The response has been fabulous,” said Terina Stewart, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee-based company. “Our stock price is up, sales are up and [an estimated] 4 out of 10 guests are ordering something from the low-carb menu.”

Customer inquiries prompted Scarborough-based Hannaford supermarkets to introduce its Carbconscious program in December. It includes in-store signs and brochures designed to help shoppers find low-carb meats, produce, deli products, baked goods and natural foods. According to company spokeswoman Caren Epstein, “customers have responded enthusiastically” thus far.

But the reaction among nutritionists has been mixed. Of particular concern is the message these low-carb promotions are sending to an already confused, weight-obsessed populace.

“The thing that troubles me the most is the commercialization of it,” said Liane Giambalvo, a dietitian and counselor who works at Eastern Maine Medical Center’s Diabetes, Endocrine and Nutrition Center in Bangor. “I see so many young women with eating disorders, and they’re so afraid to eat. It used to be, ‘Don’t eat fat.’ Now it’s, ‘Don’t eat carbs.’ What are they going to eat?”

If they’re on Atkins, the most popular of the low-carb diets, they’re not going to eat breads, sugars, grains, potatoes, rice, pasta and fruit in the induction phase. For continued weight loss, bacon is OK. So are brisket and turkey burgers, and cheeseburgers without a bun. But carrots aren’t. Low-carb pasta is allowed, as are cauliflower and cream, but no potatoes.

“Certainly there are dangers from cutting out whole categories of foods in terms of the nutritional composition of your diet,” Giambalvo said. “It isn’t just the vitamins that we know about in food. It’s also the things we don’t know about.”

The long-term health effects of Atkins and South Beach (which doesn’t bill itself as a low-carb diet – it stresses the “right” carbohydrates and fats) remain to be seen. But an article in the November 2003 issue of the Harvard Women’s Health Watch said recent research “appears to exonerate short-term adherence to Atkins and similar diets.” Among the findings in a study of 53 obese women on Atkins was a weight loss of two to three times more than they experienced on a low-fat diet.

However, in each of the studies reported in the Harvard publication, 40 percent of the participants dropped out. Giambalvo’s colleague Mary Fleming, a registered dietitian and diabetes educator, said it’s unrealistic to follow these diets over time. The rules, nutritional data, and lists of what to eat and, more important, what not to eat, are labyrinthine.

“We as nutrition experts focus on long-term weight loss through behavior change,” Fleming said.

Low-carb diets focus on rapid weight loss. But when you stray, the weight comes back just as quickly. This is especially dangerous for people who struggle with obesity.

“We don’t want to set them up for another failure,” Fleming said. “It’s very tempting when you want to lose weight quickly.”

Rapid weight loss is only part of the Atkins appeal for one local man. Serge Drage of Bangor recently started the diet again after a failed attempt last year. Now in his second week of induction, he has experienced a rise in energy that lasts throughout the day.

“I’ve got a couple of friends who started it a couple of years ago and it’s worked for them, but I didn’t follow through,” Drage said. “This year, I turned 40 and I said, ‘All right, this is it.'”

The diet isn’t that different from what he’d normally eat. On a typical morning, he has a breakfast of eggs and turkey bacon. For lunch, he eats a bunless burger with a salad. Dinner includes salad and broccoli. He stopped craving desserts and potatoes early into the diet, but he misses pizza and pasta. Still, Drage says, the tradeoff is worth it.

“I get up earlier, I have no trouble sleeping, and I have energy at the end of the day,” he said. “Within a half-hour of going to bed, I feel myself going into a natural restful mode. It’s pretty awesome.”

Drage said his friends were skeptical that he wasn’t going to get the nutrients he needed, and they joked that all he was going to eat was bacon and eggs. But he tries to stick to the Atkins regimen, and the list of allowed foods, which he says is “actually pretty huge.” This time, he’s had an easier time sticking to the diet – thanks, at least in part, to Hannaford.

“It’s easier at the grocery stores. The stickers make it easier,” he said. But there is one caveat. “I do go through and look at the actual nutrition labels, because a lot of things listed as low-carb aren’t really low-carb.”

Though she doesn’t endorse any low-carb diet, Fleming said some of the offshoots have been a boon for her diabetes patients, who often need to control their carbohydrate intake. Low-carb wraps and baked goods often have more fiber than their high-carb counterparts as well.

“We can turn around and use them well,” she said.

What she can’t condone, however, are the “extremely bold” claims made by restaurants who are hawking pork rinds as health food. She said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is looking into some of the labeling, including the use of the term “net carbs,” which isn’t a recognized measurement outside the diet world.

Fleming works to educate doctors and patients about nutrition, and she said a growing number of people are looking for alternatives to a low-carb regimen. And while Atkins and South Beach have stuck around longer than most fad diets, they won’t last forever, she said.

“I feel it’s going to phase itself out.”

Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailynews.net.