Customer Reviews

What To Eat

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Marion Nestle packs a lot of information into this one book. She takes you on a tour of a typical grocery store and explains to you the difference between products, and whether or not they are worth the price. This is only one book on the topic of what someone should eat, and like all topics, I think that it is important to read as many books as possible and then form your own conclusions.

I really liked the book, even so that I passed it around to my friends and family. Its full of great information.

Marion Nestle teaches nutrition at New York University, so her approach is objective, systematic, and unbiased. She does not favor any one way of eating, but rather untangles various food debates/misconceptions with facts.

She explains, for example, that 'organic' means absolutely nothing in the seafood industry, whereas in the meat industry it means: no animal by-products fed to animals, no antibiotics/hormones, and more humane-appearing conditions for raising animals. Then she explains that most supermarkets tend to carry "natural" (a VERY different thing) rather than 'organic' meats due to USDA's partnerships (specifically in the meat industry, but not in the fruit and vegetables industry!) with industries it regulates.

In other words, "What to Eat" dispels a lot of misconceptions, and untangles a lot of conflicting information about the North American food industry. Marion Nestle doesn't seem affiliated with any particular lobby group, as she really does appear to be impartial, as well as clearly qualified for the job.

I really appreciated Marion Nestle's approach in this book. The facts and studies she presented were always done so with a good dose of common sense, and her writing style makes for a very interesting read. The one thing that might bother some Canadian readers is that this is American book, so the politics, stores and studies are American, but I felt I was able to appreciate the information anyway. I highly recommend this book to anyone concerned with what they're eating - and why.

If a low-fat, high carb and low-calorie diet makes you feel good and helps you maintain a healthy weight and you just want to refine your regime a tiny bit, then this might be the book for you. It tells you about some of the benefits of eating organic and choosing healthier meats although it does also give terrible advice about taking vitamins and supplements.

If aiming for a low-fat, high carb and low-calorie diet makes you feel awful, hungry and ill - as it does for many of us - and has impeded your attempts to maintain a healthy weight, this book has little to offer and there are so many better books out there for you.

This book says low fat or no-fat dairy foods are the best type to get, that adequate protein can easily be gotten from beans, fluoride is safe and good for your teeth and should not be removed from drinking water, soy formulas for infants are completely safe, vegetarian diets are the healthiest, junk food is fine so long as your portions are small and not too high calorie, to lose weight you just need to eat less and move more - all of which I would strongly disagree with based on information and research in lots of far better researched books.

The section on supplements is unspeakably bad and it is very clear the author has done very little research in this area. There is a grain of truth in what she says. I would very much agree that a Centrum multivitamin (or other low quality mutivitamin) is going to do very little good to anyone, but so would every nutritional medicine expert there is! The information given here is beyond skewed and extremely selective, not to mention based on flawed studies which do not at all reflect what nutritional experts are actually recommending. It is not at all the reasonable and educated overview of this topic that it claims to be.

(For example, negative studies using the synthetic form of vitamin E in isolation are not relevant to the use of natural vitamin E in all the 8 forms and as part of a complete nutritional program. No nutrient works well in isolation or at a dose far lower than what is typically used by nutritional medicine experts. These study flaws are very well documented, even in quite old books such as 'Live Longer and Feel Better' by Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling.)

Dr Abram Hoffer explains that we need about 45 different nutrients in optimal quantities. He also explains that no nutrient works alone, and that an enzyme reaction that needs three different nutrients to take place, requires all three nutrients and so no one nutrient should be considered more important than the other.

Some nutrients can be obtained in reasonable amounts in food, while others will sometimes or always require the use of supplements to ensure optimal levels. It is not true as some claim that the optimum levels of all nutrients can be obtained through diet alone.

Supplements are necessary, for the following reasons:

* The soils used to grow our food are often very depleted.
* The levels and types of toxic pollution and toxic chemicals we are exposed to are vastly higher now than they were in the past (which requires far higher levels of nutrients than were necessary in the past, to deal with them).
* Many nutrients in food are fragile and only remain fully intact when food is picked and then eaten immediately. Storing foods for long times and heavily processing foods can dramatically lower nutrient levels in the food and may destroy some nutrients entirely; for example, oranges have been found to contain between 100 mg of vitamin C and 0 mg of vitamin C, each.
* The high levels of sugar in the diet of many people is also problematic as sugar is an anti-nutrient.

Supplements are necessary and eating well is also important. As Dr Sherry Rogers writes, 'What you eat has more power over disease than any medication your doctor can prescribe. Food is awesomely powerful.'

It is also important to be aware that the more ill you are, and the more stress your body is under the higher your nutritional needs will be. A person can need many times more vitamin C when ill than they need when they are well, and these higher doses just cannot be gotten from food.

More helpful information on intelligent supplementation is included in books such as Detoxify or Die, Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone: Megavitamin Therapeutics for Families and Physicians, Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life among others.

Other bizarre claims in this book include that no doctors disagree on the role of cholesterol causing heart disease or the need to avoid saturated fats to cut down heart disease risk. This is just not true. See books such as Ignore the Awkward.: How the Cholesterol Myths Are Kept Alive and The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It for example. Even more bizarre it is claimed that the idea that eggs are good for you is just propaganda by the egg industry!

This book reinforces the following myths:
1. Eating fat makes you fat
2. There is no such thing as good and bad foods
3. A calorie is a calorie and whether calories come form protein fat or carbs doesn't matter when it comes to weight loss
4. Junk food in moderation wont hurt anyone
5. The best diet for health and weight loss is a low-fat and high-carb diet

Reading this book felt a bit like reading the 'health and beauty' liftouts in the weekend papers. Each topic was dealt with so lightly. There was no real depth of discussion or research, or the necessary intelligent and impassioned challenging of the status quo that would make putting a book out worthwhile.

Far better books than this one which set out a diet that is all about health and disease prevention and treatment as well as weight management, and are far better researched and well written include: Eat Fat, Lose Fat: The Healthy Alternative to Trans Fats, Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life, Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food, Perfect Health Diet: Four Steps to Renewed Health, Youthful Vitality, and Long Life, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy and others.

Many of us have got fat and ill eating exactly the way this book recommends. Low fat and low calorie diets which include some junk foods and lots of highly processed foods just don't work for so many of us. If it works for the author and some others that is great, each to their own, but for many of us this is not helpful advice and is incorrect. Luckily there are lots of really wonderful diet and nutrition books available today.

Jodi Bassett, The Hummingbirds' Foundation for M.E. (HFME)