From Amazon
Willett's own simple pyramid has several benefits over the traditional format. His information is up-to-date, and you won't find recommendations that come from special-interest groups. His ideas are nothing radical--if we eat more vegetables and complex carbohydrates (no, potatoes are not complex), emphasize healthy fats, and enjoy small amounts of a tremendous variety of food, we will be healthier. You'll find some surprises as well, such as doubts about the overall benefits of soy (unless you're willing to eat a pound and a half of tofu a day), and that nuts, with their "good" fat content, are a terrific snack. Relying on research rather than anecdotes, this is a solidly written nutritional guide that will show you the real story behind how food is digested, from the glycemic index for carbs to the wisdom of adding a multivitamin to your diet. Willett combines research with matter-of-fact language and a no-nonsense tone that turns academic studies into easily understandable suggestions for living. --Jill Lightner --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
-- Timothy Johnson, M.D., M.P.H., medical editor, ABC News
"Finally, a commonsense, science-based book on nutrition that you can trust!"
-- Susan Love, author of Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book and Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Book
Book Description
Inside you'll discover:
- eye-opening new research on the healthiest carbohydrates, fats, and proteins
- why weight control is still the single most important factor
- menu plans and brand-new recipes that make it even easier to reinvent your diet
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
We eat to live.
It's a simple, obvious truth. We need food for the basics of everyday life -- to pump blood, move muscles, think thoughts.
But we can also eat to live well and live longer. By making the right choices, you will help yourself avoid some of the things we think of as the inevitable penalties of getting older. A healthy diet teamed up with regular exercise and no smoking can eliminate 80 percent of heart disease and 70 percent of some cancers. Making poor choices -- eating too much of the wrong kinds of food and too little of the right kinds, or too much food altogether -- increases your chances of developing cancer, heart disease, diabetes, digestive disorders, and aging-related loss of vision. An unhealthy diet during pregnancy can even cause some birth defects.
Separating what's good from what's bad can be a discouraging task. Each day you have to choose from an ever increasing number of foods and products, some good, most not so good. Maybe the time you have to prepare food, or even to eat, seems to shrink by the month. To make matters worse, you may feel overwhelmed by contradictory advice on what to eat. Your daily newspaper or TV newscast routinely serves up results from the latest nutrition studies. Magazines trumpet the hottest diets complete with heartfelt testimonials. One new diet or nutrition book hits the bookshelves every other day. Even supermarkets and fast-food restaurants offer advice, as do cereal boxes and a sea of Internet sites. This jumble of information quickly turns into nutritional white noise that many people tune out.
TURNING TO THE USDA PYRAMID IS A MISTAKE
For no-nonsense, rock-solid nutrition information, people often look to the Food Guide Pyramid developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It is supposed to offer straight talk that rises above the jungle of misinformation and contradictory claims.
That's a shame, because the USDA Pyramid is wrong. It was built on shaky scientific ground back in 1992. Since then it has been steadily eroded by new research from all parts of the globe. Scores of large and small research projects have chipped away at the foundation (carbohydrates), the middle (meat and milk), and the apex (fats). The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are supposed to serve as the detailed blueprint for the USDA Pyramid, are a bit better. They are updated every five years and sometimes include ready-for-prime-time research. But the USDA Pyramid hasn't really changed in spite of important advances in what we know about nutrition and health.
At best, the USDA Pyramid offers wishy-washy, scientifically unfounded advice on an absolutely vital topic -- what to eat. At worst, the misinformation contributes to overweight, poor health, and unnecessary early deaths. In either case it stands as a missed opportunity to improve the health of millions of people.
REBUILDING THE FOOD PYRAMID
I wrote this book to show you where the USDA Pyramid is wrong and why it is wrong. I wanted to offer a new healthy eating guide based on the best scientific evidence, a guide that fixes the fundamental flaws of the USDA Pyramid and helps you make better choices about what you eat. I also wanted to give you the latest information on new discoveries that should have profound effects on our eating patterns.
The Healthy Eating Pyramid is just as simple as the USDA Food Guide Pyramid. You don't have to weigh your food or tally up fat grams. There are no complicated food exchange tables to follow. You needn't eat odd combinations of foods or religiously avoid a particular type of food. Instead, our pyramid aims to nudge you toward eating mostly familiar foods that have been shown to improve health and reduce the risk of chronic disease. It involves simple changes you can make one at a time. Because it's an eating strategy aimed at improving your health instead of a diet aimed solely at helping you shed pounds, and because the changes suggested in this book can make your meals and snacks tastier, it is something you can stick with for years.
The Healthy Eating Pyramid isn't a single cute idea dolled up in a catchy graphic. It is the distillation of evidence from many different lines of research. This shouldn't be an important point, but it is. Few of the diets used by millions of Americans today are built on this kind of solid evidence. That was certainly clear from the "Great Nutrition Debate" sponsored by the USDA in February 2000. It brought together several authors of best-selling diet books for a lively, but mostly evidence-free, food fight. The wildly different recommendations presented in that three-hour session -- eat lots of meat, don't eat any meat, eat lots of carbohydrates, don't eat any carbohydrates, cut your intake of fat to under 20 percent of calories, eat as much fat as you want, stay away from sugar, eat potatoes -- neatly captured the chaos that we get in place of sound, sensible, and solid advice on healthy eating. This jumble of contradictions prompted USDA undersecretary Shirley Watkins to say afterward, "We will stand behind the Pyramid." But the USDA Pyramid isn't much better than most of these unsubstantiated diets!
THE HOLES IN THE USDA PYRAMID
Some recommendations on diet and nutrition are misguided because they are based on inadequate or incomplete information. Not the USDA Pyramid. It is wrong because it ignores the evidence that has been carefully assembled over the past forty years. Here are the USDA Pyramid's main and most health-damaging faults:
• All fats are bad. There's no question that two types of fat -- saturated fat, the kind that's abundant in whole milk or red meat, and trans fats, which are found in many margarines and vegetable shortenings -- contribute to the artery-clogging process that leads to heart disease, stroke, and other problems. But the USDA Pyramid's recommendation to use fats "sparingly" ignores the fact that two other kinds of fat -- the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats found in olive oil and other vegetable oils, nuts, whole grains, other plant products, and fish -- are good for your heart.
• All "complex" carbohydrates are good. Carbohydrates form the base of the USDA Pyramid. It suggests six to eleven servings of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta a day. But as with fats, this advice is too simplistic and overlooks essential research showing that the types of carbohydrates you eat matters a lot.
Most dietary guidelines recommend limiting simple carbohydrates (sugars) and eating plenty of complex carbohydrates (starches). White bread, potatoes, pasta, and white rice all fit this description and are the main sources of carbohydrates in the American diet. While the terms simple and complex have a specific chemical meaning, they don't mean much inside your body. In fact, your digestive system turns white bread, a baked potato, or white rice into glucose and pumps this sugar into the bloodstream almost as fast as it delivers the sugar in a cocktail of pure glucose. Swift, high spikes in blood sugar are followed by similar surges in insulin. As all this insulin forces glucose into muscle and fat cells, blood sugar levels plummet, triggering the unmistakable signals of hunger. To make matters worse, these high levels of blood sugar and insulin surges are now implicated as part of the perilous pathway to heart disease and diabetes. The harmful effects of these rapidly digested carbohydrates are especially serious for people who are overweight.
The carbohydrates that should form the keystones of a healthy diet come from whole grains, like brown rice or oats, from foods made with whole grains, like whole-wheat pasta or bread, or from beans. Your body takes longer to digest these carbohydrate packages, especially when they are coarsely ground or intact. That means they have a slow, low, and steady effect on blood sugar and insulin levels, which protects against heart disease and diabetes. They make you feel full longer and so keep you from getting hungry right away. They also give you important fiber plus plenty of vitamins and minerals.
The central message in the USDA Pyramid is that you should feel good about eating carbohydrates, especially if you are eating them in place of fats. But if you eat too much of the wrong kinds of carbohydrates and too little of the good kinds of fats, you can set yourself up for the same problems you may be trying to solve.
• Protein is protein. The protein group occupies one of the upper chambers of the USDA Pyramid. You need this type of nutrient every day and can get it from a variety of sources. The USDA Pyramid serves up as equals red meat, poultry, fish, eggs, beans, and nuts. All are excellent sources of protein. But red meat is a poor protein package because of all the saturated fat and cholesterol that come along. Red meat may also give you too much iron in a form you absorb whether you need it or not. Chicken and turkey give you less saturated fat. The same is true for fish, which delivers some important unsaturated fats as well. As protein sources, beans and nuts have some advantages over animal sources. They give you fiber, vitamins, minerals, and healthy unsaturated fats. Like fruits and vegetables, they also give you a host of phytochemicals, an ever expanding collection of plant products that help protect you from a variety of chronic diseases.
• Dairy products are essential. The USDA Pyramid includes two to three servings of dairy products a day. It's a message that the hip "Got Milk?" and even hipper "milk mustache" ads (all sponsored by the dairy industry) hammer home to every possible demographic group. As a prime source of calcium, dairy products have been enlisted to fight the so-called calcium emergency that is threatening Americans' bones. Only there isn't a calcium emergency. Americans get more calcium than the residents of almost every other country except Holland and the Scandinavian countries. And despite plenty of urgent public service announcements, there's little evidence that ...
