Page 87 - Summer 2017 Journal

All Thumbs Book Reviews
Eat Fat, Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health By Mark Hyman
Little, Brown and Company
Dr. Mark Hyman gladly jumps onto the fat-is-good-even-saturated-fat bandwagon with his latest book, Eat Fat, Get Thin. The cover photo—showing nuts, avocados, olives and veg- etable oil—tells us what to expect before even cracking the book open. Hyman describes his diet as whole-food, low-carb and paleo-vegan (“pegan”), but what he really is prescribing is a semi-vegan high-fat diet with all the wrong fats. Hyman also recommends a long list of supple- ments, conveniently for sale on the website set up especially for this book. A fiber supplement three times a day? So much for whole food.
In the book’s acknowledgements, we dis- cover that the recipes come not from Hyman but from a chef-nutritionist who also compiled recipes for Hyman’s 2013 book The Daniel Plan. The recipes feature many current food fads (cauliflower rice, raw kale salads, zucchini noodles, bulletproof coffee with coconut oil, resistant starch, smoothies with raw goitrogenic spinach and vegetable broth).
Dr. Hyman thanks Neal Barnard and Joel Fuhrman (vegans), Deepak Chopra, Jeffrey Bland, Chris Kresser (twice) and others who helped him “get the science and story right.” Despite the focus on accurate science, Hyman is confused (or confusing) when he calls palmi- toleic acid (an omega-7 monounsaturated fatty acid) a saturated fat. He also misinterprets stud- ies that he uses to argue that although saturated fats aren’t bad on the whole, a few are (mainly palmitic and stearic acid), and he points out that carbs drive the formation of these saturated fatty acids in the liver. But wait—isn’t stearic acid the one saturated fat that experts have always rated as benign because it doesn’t raise cholesterol
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levels? Hyman deems meat and eggs as accept- able (after lengthy deliberation), although they are common sources of palmitic and stearic acid.
Hyman’s comments about cholesterol are confusing. He argues that we should leave total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol tests in the twentieth century, yet he devotes a couple of pages to explaining what our numbers should be on lab tests. He states that cholesterol in older people should be higher but recommends total cholesterol under 200 mg/dL. And so on.
Lies, darned lies and statistics! Dr. Hyman gives us a little lesson in research methods, despairing at the use of food frequency ques- tionnaires, which he perceives as worthless, although they are all we have to gauge food intake. He also notes that whereas investigators like to use the statistical measure of relative risk to grab headlines, it is not a very truthful tool to predict whether a given population will develop a particular chronic condition. Calcu- lating absolute risk is the real game-changer in assessing risk. Hyman also discusses statistical problems such as small sample sizes, poor study design and overreliance on meta-analyses and epidemiological (observational) methods that cannot prove causation. He then turns around and relies on meta-analyses and studies that use relative risk and food frequency questionnaires.
A word of caution to individuals with health issues such as kidney stones, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, digestive challenges or malabsorption. Before considering Hyman’s diet, please research the anti-nutrient content of the foods he recommends. Many contain me- dium to high levels of phytates, lectins, oxalates and trypsin inhibitors. For example, Hyman enthusiastically recommends eating nuts and seeds of all kinds in many different forms, al- though raw nuts and seeds are indigestible and harmful unless they have been soaked and dried before eating. Roasted nuts and seeds have high amounts of oxidized fats, trans fats and dena-
What Dr. Hyman really is prescribing is a semi-vegan high-fat diet with all the wrong fats.
Wise Traditions
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