Rating: WORTHY!
This book was recommended to me by a weird niece who I love, but who neglected to tell me it was a doorstep of a book. I almost needed a shopping cart to haul it out of the library with. The author is a medical doctor who has made a long study of diet and health, and the book is packed with advice about what's good and safe to eat and what's not. The thing is that he goes into way too much detail and the book reads more like a scientific treatise than a popular book on health. It has copious end notes in addition to the waffling text so be advised that the actual reading text is only about two-thirds of the entire thickness of this tome.
That verbose style turned me off a bit, and I didn't read it cover to cover, but I skimmed and read in detail parts that interested me. There were many such parts. Most of what's in here isn't new or news to vegetarians and vegans, and you could probably get a good feedback out of it from reading only the last section where the doctor talks about his own dietary habits. Follow those or emulate them closely and your health will improve, and also, very likely, your life expectancy. The advice is simple: eat whole foods, fresh vegetables and fruits, and a variety, and you'll be doing the best you can for whatever your genetic inheritance has set you up with.
The author points out issues and problems and explains perceived discrepancies in medical diet advice. For example, a dissenter may argue that fruit has fructose in it - a sugar. Isn't that bad for you? That's why eating whole foods rather than processed foods is the word here. When you eat a fruit, you eat the whole thing including the fiber. It's not just the juice, nor is it just the sugar. It's everything, and one part of the fruit helps to mitigate another, so the sugar is processed by your body as part of the whole meal of the fruit and it doesn't spike the way it would if you drank the sugar, like in a can of cola, for example.
The book is full of useful information like that - about why this works better than that does. And eating whole foods doesn't necessarily mean you have to buy everything fresh and cook it all from scratch for every meal, but the book points out that one price you may pay for buying canned vegetables, for example, as opposed to fresh, is that the canning process often involves adding salt (or sugar, or both). So if you look for 'no salt added' in a can, for example, and drain the fluid from the can, cooking the food in fresh water, you can mitigate a lot of the problems with buying canned food. The same applies if you drain the 'syrup' (read 'sugar' form canned fruit, and just eat the fruit.
The author also has a book out with also the same title as this except for an added 'T' on the end: How Not to Diet. I'm not about to embark on that one! I have too much other stuff on my plate (reading plate), but don't worry, because there are some cooking tips included in this book, such as, for example, how to prepare cruciferous vegetables (Broccoli, cauliflower): after chopping them or breaking them apart, let them sit for a while so the 'damage' the cutting process has done allows time for various enzymes in the veggies to interact and create beneficial compounds which will contribute to your health. The book is full of simple things like that, but there is so much in this book that it's too much to remember. However, if you take away only the message of cutting back on meats and substituting whole, fruits and veggies and some whole grain, you will be well on your journey towards better health, rest assured. I commend this book as a worthy read - or skim!
