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“Essential reading . . . This will completely change your ideas about what you should be eating.”—Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums
Investigative journalist Barry Estabrook was often on the receiving end of his doctor’s scowl. Realizing he had two options—take more medication or lose weight—Estabrook chose the latter, but was paralyzed by the options. Which diet would keep the weight off? What program could he maintain over time? What diet works best—or even at all?
Over the course of three years, Estabrook tried the regimens behind the most popular diets of the past forty years—from paleo, keto, gluten-free, and veganism to the Master Cleanse, Whole30, Atkins, Weight Watchers—examining the people, claims, and science behind the fads, all while recording his mental and physical experience of following each one. Along the way, he discovered that all the branded programs are derived from just three diets. There are effective, scientifically valid takeaways to be cherry-picked . . . and the rest is just marketing. Perhaps most alarming, Estabrook uncovered how short-term weight loss can do long-term health damage that may go undetected for years. Estabrook contextualizes his reporting with an analysis of our culture’s bizarre dieting history, dating back to the late 1800s, to create a thorough—and thoroughly entertaining—look at what specific diets do to our bodies, why some are more effective than others, and why our relationship with food is so fraught.
Estabrook’s account is a relatable, pragmatic look into the ways we try to improve our health through dieting, revealing the answer may be to just eat.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 2, 2021 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780399580284
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780399580284
- File size: 13958 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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January 1, 2021
The bestselling author of Tomatoland returns with a tasty exposition of diet fads and their discontents. Estabrook, a former James Beard Award-winning contributing editor at Gourmet, opens with a familiar scenario of lament: Over the years, he has gained too much weight, the result of advancing age, inadequate exercise, and splendid dining. How to get those unwanted pounds off? "Joining the two-thirds of Americans who have medically significant amounts of weight to lose, I decided to go on a diet, something I'd never done," he writes. The plan he chose, Whole30, was done for all the wrong reasons, he adds--it was the current fad, one whose inventors "cleverly tweaked the old paleo precepts to appeal to the social media set." The problem was that it didn't work. When those precepts give way to the reality of gnawing hunger, the weight comes back. Estabrook follows with a somewhat dispiriting tour of diets old and new, from the pious to the wacky--e.g., the nasty Master Cleanse, "which was invented in the 1940s but is enjoying a revival among celebrities"; the alcohol-saturated Banting diet, named for an English coffin maker whose regime consisted of "between five and seven glasses of wine, on top of his liquor-moistened morning toast and...optional tumbler of grog." The author weighs each in the balance and finds them wanting, including the still-fashionable paleo diet, which, says one paleoanthropologist, "has no basis in archaeological reality." After an amiable visit with French chef Jacques P�pin, who never met a food he didn't like but has always maintained a healthy weight, Estabrook concludes with a program whose tenets seem common-sensical but also get buried in the diet-literature buzz: Take in fewer calories, avoid empty calories from sugar and alcohol, and keep track of your weight regularly with an accurate scale. His book is fittingly slender, but Estabrook packs a lot of highly useful information into a narrative that's also enjoyably snarky. A lively tour of paunch and pantry that proves the adage that less is more.COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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