Page 65 - Fall2013

All Thumbs Book Reviews

Young for Life: The "subversive" information continues with
The Easy No-Diet, No-Sweat Plan to the claim that butter is a health food, cholesterol
Look and Feel Ten Years Younger is good for you, and soy isn’t. If you want to get
By Marilyn Diamond and those all-important fat-soluble vitamins like A
Dr. Donald “Rock” Schnell and D, you’re going to have to eat animal foods
Rodale Books, 2013 that come with fat and cholesterol.
Diamond and Schnell point out that the
In the mid-1980s Marilyn Diamond and her cherry-picking Seven-Countries Study by Ancel
husband of the time co-wrote a wildly influential Keys cannot be considered science and proves
bestseller called Fit for Life, which promoted nothing about fat or cholesterol in relation to
vegetarian or vegan diets as the path to perfect coronary heart disease. Major studies mentioned
health and vitality. So when I was handed her re- in this book include the study by Dr. Michael
cent book to review I had low expectations for it. DeBakey, the Nurses’ Health Study by Harvard
Then I read the introduction. I learned that after University, the Health Professionals Follow-Up
decades of a nutrient-sparse diet combined with a Study, and the massive Framingham Study. Bil-
lot of aerobic exercise, Marilyn was in bad shape. lions of dollars have been spent trying to prove
So she abandoned her own advice, upgraded to the cholesterol-lipid hypothesis. The result has
a smarter husband, and wrote a smarter book. been failure. Have we wasted enough money yet?
Marilyn and Dr. Rock now know that, con- Did Diamond and Schnell happen to discov-
trary to the over-flaunted myth, vegetarians do er our website and learn anything there? I don’t
not in fact live longer than the rest of us. Diamond know. There is no mention of it in their book,
and Schnell go on to assert that any food that is yet they do list Weston Price’s Nutrition and
composed of isolated protein and no fat must be Physical Degeneration as a resource and there
a chemically processed substance because such are brief references to Sally Fallon [Morell] and
a creation doesn’t occur naturally with real food. Dr. Mary Enig as well. This book is interesting
Is it possible that they understand the importance from the standpoint that, once again, people with
of saturated fat? Why, yes it is. They also under- firsthand experience with veganism have found
stand that a lot of important nutrition informa- their way to Weston A. Price. Thumbs UP.
tion is mysteriously missing from databases like Review by Tim Boyd
Medline.
The approach to exercise in this book is an
improvement over the time-consuming aerobic
approach. Isometric exercise is promoted and a
routine that only takes a few minutes is suggested
for those who want to try it. Contrary to the
There are a lot of supplement recom-
mendations that I don’t necessarily agree with over-flaunted
completely but then they move on to cover the myth,
fat-soluble vitamins, starting with vitamin D. vegetarians in
The coverage of how sunlight is converted to
vitamin D is slightly flawed but they correctly fact do not
state that the sun does not cause melanoma. In live longer than
fact, the sun is an important weapon against the rest of us.
cancer.
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