Thumbs Down: The South Beach Diet

by Stephen Byrnes, PhD, RNCP

With the popularity of low-carb diets reaching a high point recently, it was only a matter of time before someone adjusted it into “nutritional correctness.” Enter The South Beach Diet by cardiologist Arthur Agatston, MD, of Miami, Florida, which has sold millions of copies and has remained on the best-seller list for many months.

The South Beach Diet is most certainly a low-carb eating regime with the usual carbohydrate foods such as bread (even whole grain), fruit, fruit juices, and rice, potatoes, and pasta excluded (or kept to a bare minimum). Of course, white sugar is out, as well as the whole gamut of processed carbohydrate snack foods.

So far, so good. But then the book gets the dieter into trouble because the author urges high protein consumption in the form of skim milk, lean meat and other nonfat foods, and prohibits the use of animal fats, a dangerous combination that rapidly depletes vitamin A stores leading to auto-immune diseases and underactive thyroid (which can cause weight gain) and even cancer and heart disease.

Furthermore, by eliminating both saturated fats and carbohydrate foods, the body has no ready source of the saturated fats it needs to build healthy cell membranes. Many studies have indicated that a regimen like the South Beach diet, high in unsaturated oils (even the so-called monounsaturated oils) and low in saturated result in disease, including heart disease. This is what happens when weak science is allied to political correctness...

Read full article here: Weston A. Price

Eat Fat And Grow Slim

by Richard Mackarness, M.B.,B.S. (1958)

From the Foreword by Sir Heneage Ogilvie, KBE, DM, M CH, FRCS
Consultant Surgeon, Guy's Hospital, Editor of 'The Practitioner'
Late: Vice-President of the Royal College of Surgeons

THE STATISTICIAN looks on nutrition as a mater of calories, and on obesity as a question of upset caloric equilibrium. A calorie is a unit of heat, a unit of potential energy, but not a unit of nutrition. Prison governors, school superintendents, dictators whether of a nation or of a small community, talk in calories to prove that they are feeding their charges or their victims adequately. Fellows of the Royal Society, and doctors with political leanings, talk in calories as if the human body were a machine requiring a certain amount of fuel to enable it to do a certain amount of work.

A motor-car needs calories, and we give it calories in the form of petrol. If we give it good petrol it will do good work for quite a long time. But even a Rolls-Royce cannot find its own fuel. It cannot separate motor spirit and lubricating oil from the crude mixture brought by a tanker from the wells of Kuwait. It cannot clean its own pipes, clear its own choked jets, grind its own valves, re-line its own bearings when they are worn, and replace defective parts as they need renewal. The body can do all these things. but the body is not a machine, and to do them it needs food not fuel...

Full access to the book here: Eat Fat And Grow Slim

Eat Fat, Get Thin!

Synopsis
Explains that the diet on which it is most difficult to lose weight is a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. Barry Groves took up full-time research into the relationship between dietary constituents and modern diseases.

From the author:
Eat Fat, Get Thin -- the natural way to a healthy slim body

Fact: No animal in its natural habitat gets fat. Fact: Obesity is also noticeably absent in primitive human cultures. Fact: The only animals to become overweight on this planet are 'civilised' Man -- and his pets.

This is highly significant.

We do not get fat because we eat too much (although many do). If that were the cause, other species with an ample food supply would also get fat -- yet they don't. In fact, the only animals in their natural environment who are genetically disposed to put on fat are those whose food supply is not guaranteed.

Surely everyone who has lost weight by starving (which is what low-calorie dieting is) only to put it back on again, must know that 'dieting' does not work.

It doesn't work because it is unnatural.

Many animals, including us, have evolved the ability to store energy as fat in case of times when food is scarce. If we do not eat enough the body fights to retain fat. For this reason low-fat, low-calorie dieting forces our bodies to conserve energy -- it is a recipe for weight gain.

The way to lose weight is firstly to eat as much energy as your body needs, and secondly to eat foods that we, as a species, have evolved and are genetically programmed to eat.

Eat Fat, Get Thin! Looks at our evolution; it tells how the body works and why low-fat, low-calorie diets ultimately lead to weight gain; and, lastly it guides the reader on the correct way to eat so that the body's own energy-regulating mechanisms work correctly. Because, if you let it, your body can count calories far more accurately than you can.

At age 62 my wife, Monica, is fit and healthy, eating as much as she wants. She is 5 ft 6 ins tall and weighs just 124 lbs. When a friend, who has been on and off diets for most of her life, found that we lived the way I write about in Eat Fat, Get Thin! she said to Monica: "do you mean you have been dieting for thirty-six years?"

Monica's answer was, "No, we have been eating normally for thirty-six years!"

Direct Amazon UK link: Eat Fat, Get Thin!