Living Low Carb (41 page)
Authors: Jonny Bowden
Foods with bar codes—not so much.
Rubin has studied and absorbed this tradition well, and there’s more in this book to recommend than there is to critique. This program is completely focused on whole, real foods and is pretty much in line with the precepts of low-carb, low-sugar eating.
I mentioned earlier that the book comes with a heavy overlay of religion. This is no minor point. Everything about this program has religious overtones; even when the nutritional information is sound, it always comes cloaked in Biblical dogma. For example: I’m not a big fan of eating pork, because pigs are highly intelligent social animals and I can’t abide the unspeakably cruel conditions under which they’re raised in factory farms, even though their meat can be perfectly healthful to eat. Rubin’s not a fan of pork because the Bible says “Do not eat swine. These are unclean animals” (Lev. 11:7–8). Rubin and I reach similar conclusions, but for vastly different reasons.
Even the non-nutritional parts of the program are always justified by Biblical scripture. Take rest, an important part of any wellness program. Here’s how it’s presented by Rubin: “Our Creator has provided us with detailed instructions and schedules for preserving our own personal performance. The Father knows best—we all need a Sabbath rest.” And that’s just a mild example. The Bible is quoted a lot, and many dietary rules come not from science or even from a nutritional philosophy, but from “revealed word,” and that might be a problem for some people. Full disclosure (in case I wasn’t clear before): it’s definitely a problem for me.
The other negative in the book goes back to the whole marketing of the Jordan Rubin empire, a multimillion-dollar company that involves supplements, online membership sites, books, and retreats. Specific vitamins (made by his company) are recommended and part of the diet, as are special cleaning products (like Clenzology) made by his company. There’s a strong emphasis on “natural hygiene,” a movement that began back around 1850 and continued into the days of the eccentric John Harvey Kellogg, founder of the Battle Creek Sanatorium (and yup, the founder of Kellogg’s cereals). To get a real feel for the Maker’s Diet program, check out the beginning of a typical day:
Morning Hygiene and Tune-Up
Clenzology Comprehensive cleaning system for face and hands (note: Clenzology is a product made by Rubin’s company)
Morning Prayer
Morning Exercise
Morning Music Therapy
Breakfast
Tomato-Basil Omelette
2–3 Living Multi Vitamins (Living Multi is made by Rubin’s company)
Great meals, great food, plus more prayer, natural hygiene rituals, more exercise, you get the idea. The schedule would be what you might expect to find at a Christian retreat. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Perfect Weight America” is “The Maker’s Diet” specifically applied to the problem of weight. It’s based on the idea that everyone has a perfect weight, and that that is different for each person. “God created everyone differently, and our bodies change shape as we grow older,” he says on the Perfect Weight America Web site. “I don’t think anyone can tell you what your perfect weight should be.”
Fair enough. There’s a fitness component to the program with the acronym FIT, which stands for Functional Interval Training. It’s functional training because you train movements rather than muscles. Interval training alternates short periods of high-intensity exercise (intervals) with “active rest” or low-intensity recovery times—it’s generally a very effective way to work out. Jordan has a series of short exercise videos on his Perfect Weight America Web site to give you a sense of what’s in store.
Perfect Weight America
isn’t a bad book at all. He takes a few swipes at Atkins, but they’re not mean-spirited or ill-informed like many other books.
For the most part, the eating program is spot-on and pretty much what you’d expect from the author of
The Maker’s Diet
: low sugar, vanishingly low amounts of processed foods, and plenty of meat, fish, vegetables, fiber, fruit, and nuts. There’s no way you could go wrong with that.
I particularly like his section on Nutritional Typing and his recognition that different people will fare differently on different proportions of carbs, protein, and fat (but that
no one
fares well on high-sugar foods). And his list of the most healing foods on the planet closely parallels much of what I’ve written since
The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth
.
The nutritional information in
The Maker’s Diet
(and in
Perfect Weight
) trumps the garbage pseudoscience in
The 5-Factor Diet
or
The 3-Hour Diet
any day of the week. Rubin knows his stuff. He debt to the Weston Price Foundation is in evidence everywhere (and that’s a good thing!). He’s a fan of grass-fed beef, isn’t afraid of saturated fat, doesn’t think the sun rises and sets on soy. Not being a born-again Christian, I just have trouble with the rest of it.
Maker’s Diet and Perfect Weight as a Lifestyle: Who It Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere
If you’re a fan of nutritional or Metabolic Typing®, you’ll know what I mean when I say the eating portion of this book is well suited to “Protein Types.” This is not a program for vegetarians. Those who thrive on higher-meat, higher-fat diets with plenty of vegetables will find a lot to their liking here. The program isn’t as structured as some of the other diets we’ve looked at, but is rather a general lifestyle built around whole, traditional foods.
The religious overtones—and I’m putting it mildly—will turn off a lot of people. I personally found the religious dogma hard to take and offputting. If you’re not okay with statements like “Always observe God’s dietary laws” or “Eat any fish with fins and scales but avoid fish or water creatures without them” (Lev. 11:9–10), you’d better look elsewhere. I doubt that this book will appeal to people who don’t identify themselves as either religious Christians or evangelicals. It’s a shame, because most of what he has to say about food is pretty darn good.
JONNY’S LOWDOWN
(Impossible to Rate)
Two off-the-beaten-track books that should appeal to the “homeschooling” crowd as well as those who are suspicious of conventional medicine and conventional secular society in general. Perfect Weight America is The Maker’s Diet applied to weight loss, and has a nice fitness component. The info on food and diet in both is not half bad, and is rooted in the great tradition of following a native diet of unprocessed whole foods, avoiding sugar and processed carbs, and not being fearful of full-fatted options (as long as they haven’t been processed to death).
But the religious context is all but impossible to separate from the dietary recommendations. If that doesn’t put you off, there’s a lot in these books to recommend them.
WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL
The simplest of the low-carb diets to follow; also one of the most restrictive. You don’t have to follow any formulas, compute any protein or carb allowances, look up any food counts, or figure out calories. Here’s what you do.
Eat:
• meats and fish
• fruits, especially berries
• vegetables
• nuts and seeds
Do Not Eat:
• grains
• beans
• potatoes
• dairy (especially milk)
• sugar
The book has three premises.
1. A natural diet is best.
2. Nature is defined as the absence of technology.
3. Until the advent of agriculture, grains, beans, potatoes, milk, and refined sugar were not part of the human diet. So don’t eat them.
Hence, no grains, beans, potatoes, milk, or refined sugar. Period.
The main theme of Neanderthin is that the root cause of numerous diseases of civilization (including obesity) is eating processed foods. More specifically, you should not eat foods that are inedible in their natural state and can only be eaten because they’ve been processed (chief among them: wheat, dairy, and sugar).
In the late 1970s, Ray Audette was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis (a crippling, painful autoimmune disease), which sidetracked his career in computers and threatened to destroy his health. Later, at the age of 34, he was diagnosed with diabetes. He decided not to take these life sentences sitting down. He researched everything he could about the diseases and came up with a few basic observations and one major conclusion, which led to his development of the Neanderthin diet, another spin on “stone-age nutrition.”
Observation number one: rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes are diseases of the autoimmune system—diseases in which the immune system wrongfully identifies something in its own body as foreign matter or an invader and proceeds to attack it. (He happens to be completely wrong about diabetes—it is
not
an autoimmune disease—but follow the argument anyway.) Observation number two: these diseases occur only within agricultural (or civilized) communities. (The more recently a population became agricultural, the more likely it is to have diabetic members.) Many of the foods that came into wide use during the agricultural era (such as wheat) aggravate these conditions. Audette looked at these two observations and made a decision: he would modify his own diet to emulate that of preagricultural (Paleolithic) peoples. He’d go “back to nature.”
He decided to eat like a hunter–gatherer.
Obviously it worked, or he wouldn’t have written his book. His bloodsugar levels returned to normal almost immediately. He had more energy. His joints stopped hurting. He needed less sleep. He literally became a new man.
One who was on a mission.
The Neanderthin diet is pretty simple and follows one basic dietary guideline: eat only what you could eat if you were naked on the savanna with a sharp stick. It’s a variation on the “eat only what you could hunt, fish, gather, or pluck” mantra. Forbidden foods are those that require technological intervention to make them edible. The book starts with a quote from the book of Genesis: “Do not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge that makes the good the evil.” Using the Greek translation of the phrase
tree of knowledge
and Hebrew translation of the words
good
and
evil
, he restates the quote this way: “Do not eat the fruit of the technology that makes the inedible the edible.”
The appeal of the diet is that it’s simple. Really simple. You don’t count calories. You eat all you like from four basic food groups (meat/fish, nuts/ seeds, fruits/berries, and vegetables). You don’t reduce fat (except some saturated fats such as the skin of chicken). And you
do not
cheat. (One reason: the forbidden categories of foods have the innate ability to create cravings for themselves.) This is not a diet for the squeamish or the warm and fuzzy. When Audette says “forbidden fruits,” he means business.
Audette suggests six steps to success in Paleo eating.
1. Make a commitment. Resolve that for some predetermined amount of time (three weeks would be great), you will not eat any grains, beans, potatoes, milk, or refined sugar. Period.
2. Rid your kitchen of the forbidden fruits: beans, grains, dairy products, potatoes, and sugar, as well as any products made from them.
3. Limit your carb intake. Fruits and vegetables are fine, of course, but he suggests choosing those that have a low sugar content—pears, oranges, plums, and berries, for example, rather than bananas, mangoes, and dates. And he suggests raw fruits and vegetables over steamed, cooked, or canned ones.
4. Increase fat consumption, preferably from omega-3 fats, which are described in Audette’s book in detail (see also
chapter 4
of this book).
5. Drink a ton of water—8 glasses a day minimum, preferably 2 to 3 liters.
6. Increase physical activity. A “Neander-fit” program is included, with an emphasis on building muscle (rather than burning calories) and working at considerably less than full-out “no pain, no gain” intensity.
You also shouldn’t drink alcohol, although he says that if you must, you can do damage control by making it fruit-based alcohol such as wine or champagne.