DIET BUSTERS
Obesity and nutrition specialist Dr Michael Greger has spent years being boiling mad at diet books and fads. Finally, he set out to write a comprehensive scientific rebuttal to the whole darned shower of them. After many years in the field, he had all the data at his fingertips.
It turned, he ruefully admits, into another diet book. How Not to Diet: The Groundbreaking Science of Healthy, Permanent Weight Loss has it all: moving personal anecdotage, good food lists, naughty food lists, a list of shortcuts and a companion book of recipes.
However, the book has one feature almost no other diet book can lay claim to. It is based entirely on science’s gold standard: randomised, controlled blind trials. It’s chattily written. “The best way to find out if a loaf of bread is healthy is to drop it on your foot” – in other words, “ouch” is good.
But at just shy of 600 pages, the book is more like an encyclopaedia. Every assertion or recommendation is backed up with the details of the relevant studies, including behavioural trials, such as the work of New Zealand’s University of Otago, which he says has been a fount of reliable information.
“People can go and check these studies out for themselves if they want to. My purpose was to provide a counter to all the bad information that’s out there.”
“For three weeks, do exactly what I tell you and you will feel so much better, you will have better digestion, better sleep, more energy.”
Of course, he’s still furious with the multibillion-dollar, ingeniously self-perpetuating diet industry, the addiction-stoking processed-food industry, and the artificially-animal-fattening tendencies of agriculture. But
