Health

A Feast of Diet Books, From Atkins to Okinawa

By gail johnson

Publish Date: 30-Dec-2004

Mark Atomos Pilon illustration

The leftovers have been consumed, the cookie jar is empty, and you can barely bend over to buckle up your ski boots. It's diet time! Of course, any smart health professional will tell you dieting is a waste of time, far from a wise way to lose weight. To do that, the best strategy is a combination of regular exercise and balanced meals that are abundant in vegetables and fruit. But diets will never lose their appeal. The latest onslaught of related books features everything from a vegan lifestyle to the ever-present low-carbohydrate approach.

The latter is still the most popular diet around, thanks to the late Dr. Robert C. Atkins, who introduced his nutritional approach in 1972. Advocates maintain that the low-carb, high-protein plan leads to swift weight loss and an increase in energy. Critics, however, have been increasingly vocal about the potential dangers of Atkins, saying that its long-term effects aren't known. They suspect that the diet, which allows for a generous intake of fat but not fibre, could lead to cardiovascular and liver problems and makes the body break down muscle tissue.

The theory behind Atkins is that carbohydrates tend to increase blood sugars. Controlling the intake of carbs--but not calories--changes the body's metabolism, causing it to burn stored body fat. Patricia Haakonson is a firm believer. The Toronto-based cook, who started the diet five years ago, has lost more than 40 pounds and claims that her colitis (a bowel disease) has "disappeared". Haakonson wrote All New Easy Low-Carb Cooking: Over 300 Delicious Recipes Including Breads, Muffins, Cookies, and Desserts and, with her doctor husband, Harv, coauthored Slow Carb for Life: The Ultimate Practical Guide to Low-Carb Living
(ECW Press, $24.95 for each).

Contributing to the guide's usefulness is the way it explains terms like glycemic index (a rating system for how quickly foods are broken down into sugar and absorbed into the bloodstream) and helps readers understand the difference between saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsatured fats and trans-fatty acids. It provides rules for "slow-carb living", some of which are commonsense--such as not skipping breakfast--and others that doctors and nutritionists would surely condemn, like the advice to eat a single serving of fruit a day. (Canada's Food Guide to Healthy Eating recommends five to 10 servings of fruit and vegetables daily.)

There are a few dozen recipes in the guide, but cooks looking for a collection without the lifestyle lesson would do better with Easy Low-Carb Cooking. Among the more innovative offerings are sausage pie (sans pastry), curried crab, creamy asparagus soup, salmon-and-avocado salad, pecan chicken, and, for dessert, lemon-cream pie and chocolate-almond torte. Each recipe comes with a box listing the number of calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, and fibre.

More adventurous dishes are found in The Okinawa Diet Plan: Get Leaner, Live Longer, and Never Feel Hungry (Clarkson Potter, $35.95). Written by Bradley J. Willcox, D. Craig Willcox, and Makoto Suzuki, the book educates people on how to "eat the Okinawa way". The Okinawans, who inhabit an archipelago of islands between Japan and Taiwan, don't gain significant weight as they age. It seems they do this by being active and by restricting calories, which together lead to "metabolically efficient bodies". But limiting calories doesn't mean the Okinawan people are deprived.

The Okinawa Diet Plan outlines the 10 principles of the diet--like consuming plenty of soy, eating good carbs (including brown rice) and avoiding bad ones (such as white bread), and increasing dietary fibre (by having fruit at every meal and eating things like oatmeal and legumes). The book points out that the Okinawans' favourite food is fish and that they use an abundance of herbs (like cilantro and mint) and spices (such as cardamom and nutmeg). It also has more than 150 recipes that are divided into eastern, western, and fusion groups. They include green-tea steamed bread, sweet-potato-and-orange muffins, sea-bass-and-fennel soup, chicken-edamame curry, cumin-chili cauliflower, and, to finish, tropical-mango pudding and tofu­key lime pie.

You won't find any recipes in The Body Sense Natural Diet: Six Weeks to a Slimmer, Healthier You (Wiley, $24.99). Rather, Lorna R. Vanderhaeghe looks at the roles that hormones, emotions, and stress play in weight loss. She does provide a meal plan that features items like protein bars, smoothies, salads, baked chicken, and no dessert. Her suggested menu ideas are just a small portion of the book, which also has a section on "fast, fun fitness". She includes illustrations of simple but effective strengthening exercises that can easily be done at home.

Some of Vanderhaeghe's choices of content are questionable, though. Take the chapter on conquering cellulite. She devotes 18 pages to the problem of "orange-peel skin", giving readers false hope that Epsom-salt baths, lymphatic-drainage massage, silicon supplements, and hibiscus tea are among
the ways to get rid of it. "Now that you are taking detoxification baths and/or sauna, have completed the 7 day detoxification diet and learned so much about your liver, digestion, nutrition and exercise, you will see those stubborn cellulite deposits melt away," Vanderhaeghe writes. The author might have a degree in biochemistry, but she's not qualified to make those kinds of medically unsubstantiated claims.

North Vancouver triathlete Brendan Brazier talks about the "modern plague" of stress and its impact on well-being in Thrive: A Guide to Optimal Health & Performance Through Plant-Based Whole Foods (Oceanside Publishing, $10.95). A vegan, Brazier says that his food choices have had the greatest impact on his energy and wellness. He outlines the elements of his plant-based diet that work for him--and that provide sufficient amounts of iron, protein, and vitamin B12, which are just some nutrients that critics say a vegan approach lacks. But his arguments are also reasonable; he recognizes that a strict animal-free diet isn't for everybody and says that its principles can benefit anyone. Some of his favourite foods are tofu, flax, whole grains, sesame and pumpkin seeds, and legumes. And he even allows for dessert, like his chocolate "recovery" pudding.