The report, based on an external examination of the body and some hospital information, said Dr. Atkins had a history of heart attack, congestive heart failure and hypertension. His wife objected to an autopsy, Ms. Borakove said, so none was performed.

Responses to the report's release came quickly from Atkins quarters. Dr. Stuart Trager, chairman of the Atkins Physicians Council, a group of physicians who work as consultants to the Atkins organization, said the Journal article ''was based on incomplete personal medical records that were illegally delivered to the newspaper in violation of federal law.''

He said Dr. Atkins did not have a history of heart attack, nor was he obese. He said that Dr. Atkins weighed 195 pounds the day after he entered the hospital following his fall, and that he gained 63 pounds from fluid retention during the nine days he was in a coma before he died. Dr. Trager said Dr. Atkins did have cardiomyopathy, a heart muscle disease that was probably caused by a virus, not by what he ate. While Dr. Atkins had an episode of cardiac arrest the year before his death, Dr. Trager said, he was unaware that he had had any history of heart attack.

''Old age was not particularly kind to him,'' he said. ''This cardiomyopathy was a real bugger. But the physicians who were treating him had no reason to think it was diet related.''

Veronica Atkins, Dr. Atkins's widow, issued a statement yesterday expressing her horror at ''unscrupulous individuals'' who ''continue to twist and pervert the truth.'' She added, ''I have been assured by my husband's physicians that my husband's health problems late in life were completely unrelated to his diet or any diet.''

Dr. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, stressed that it was not Dr. Atkins's health alone that interested him. ''I'm concerned about the Atkins machine trying to play the card that Atkins was healthy and thin into old age,'' he said. In his view, the Atkins diet ''is an imminent public health threat.''

Dr. John McDougall, a member of the Physicians Committee and an internist who had debated Dr. Atkins, said there was no doubt that Dr. Atkins had lost weight after his cardiac arrest, but before that was a different story. ''I knew the man,'' he said. ''He was grossly overweight. I thought he was 40 to 60 pounds overweight when I saw him, and I'm being kind.''