A wonderful, recent example of the fragility of an information cascade is the demise of the Atkins Diet craze that occurred earlier this decade. Its official website is www.atkins.com, but I have used its Wikipedia article – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_Nutritional_Approach – as my main source of clarification. As the article explains, the diet was first created in the early 1970s by Dr. Robert Atkins. Books about it existed from this point through the end of the century, but nobody took very much notice of it. In 1989 Dr. Atkins founded the company Atkins Nutritionals to promote his diet. Finally in 2003 and 2004 it reached its tipping point and became a huge phenomenon. Its magnitude can be fathomed by looking at this 2003 article – http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2003-12-25-subway-atkins_x.htm or this 2004 article – http://media.www.thenews.org/media/storage/paper651/news/2004/01/30/News/Atkins.Diet.Prompts.Menu.Adjustments-592444.shtml. They basically explain how powerful restaurants such as Subway, Hardee’s, TGI Friday’s and Burger King all took steps to assist customers with following the Atkins Diet. This shows that the diet was widespread enough that the companies respected it as either 1) leverage to draw in more customers or 2) something unavoidable to sustain the number of customers they were receiving.

This popularity, which began in 2003 with the cascade model we examined in class (when people and businesses alike were suddenly and in a very brief period of time obsessed with it), diminished very quickly by the end of 2004. In 2005 the company that Atkins founded was required to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy. This sudden turn of events shows how just one or two nodes in a cascade can stop and cause the “Domino Effect” to reverse itself. At the moment the Atkins company still exists but it is no longer a force of any type. I was unable to find the word “Atkins” anywhere on the Subway or T.G.I. Friday’s websites. This is something that is very simple to see since it happened just a few years ago. I vividly remember long food commercials lauding their adherence to Atkins principles. But now the word is hardly heard at all and low-carbohydrate diets are seldom mentioned.