Let me start by saying I drink three cups of coffee every morning, sometimes at a McDonald’s while eating an Egg McMuffin, and one or two nights in the month I drink a can of Diet Pepsi while practicing my couch potato techniques watching recordings of UFC Fight Night.
Courtesy Weight Words
According to Matt Fitzgerald, Author of Diet Cults: The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide to Healthy Eating for the Rest of Us, that makes me part of a community of agnostic healthy eaters, which is to say we eat everything, but more of the healthiest foods, such as vegetables, than least healthy foods, such as diet sodas and McMuffins.
Fitzgerald is known as a nutrition and fitness writer and in Diet Cults he targets, but doesn’t debunk, a long list of dietary approaches, Paleo, vegan, low-carb, low-fat, raw, and so on, that claim to be the “One True Way” to healthy eating.
I’m not big on writing book reviews. A friend trying to lose weight mailed me this book with the message, “You should review this book and write an article”. Most book reviews I’ve written start with, “I couldn’t get past the first chapter,” well, I found myself finishing Diet Cults.
It’s not the greatest book I’ve read on nutrition and fitness. The Book’s claim that science has not identified the healthiest way to eat is enough to confirm that there is no such thing as the healthiest diet – this runs contrary to a planet of evidence that humans are adaptable and able to thrive on a variety of diets.
Is it because I’m over 55-years old I believe I can say, “I’ve heard it all” so what’s new in this book is, and most relevant to my friend, is we are hyped and super hyped by media when it comes to our food. Perhaps it’s a better idea that we eat everything from the top down – vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds and yes, in less amounts and less frequent from the bottom, McMuffin and pizza slices and the occasional diet soda.
There must be something about friends sending me food books? Another friend, who can’t seem to gain or drop weight, dropped off Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, a downsized book of 64 pages with 64 principles of eating written by Michael Pollan. This book was more like a chapter for me, and in its summation, “Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants”.
The book does lack originality compared to Pollan’s five previous massive books on food, yet it is simple in its principles. So “Don’t eat anything your great‐grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” to “Avoid food products that have more than five ingredients”, to “Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs and other mammals]”.
My friend seemed to think I needed another book, and in days he returned. Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes showing how refined carbohydrates, a lack of real fat, and how our behaviour and habits are responsible for bad nutrition. I reviewed this book by reading ten other reviews.
Maybe my friends should read these books? Stop sending me books! I’m writing my own book! To choose, and for my book-delivering friends, I would have to say that I’m an agnostic healthy eater, this week anyway, or until I need to break out the emergency Nutella!
Richard is a certified personal trainer, a health and fitness reporter and the owner of Never Better Health & Wellness for the over 50 crowd. You can reach him at tardifrichardg@videotron.ca, or at www.richardtardif.com
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