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A few chest-puffing dieticians and
doctors bagged it because it suggests you can have a few decent
serves of meat a week instead of the National Dietary Guidelines
recommended dose of a few thimble fulls. However, it's more likely
that the National Guidelines are out of whack, rather than the Total
Wellbeing Diet.
Let's make no bones about it, if you
stick with this diet you'll lose weight and feel
great.
In fact if you stick with any diet
that strips out the junk you'll lose weight. And
stripping out junk is what Manny and her mates have done.
Junk food
In actual fact, I think the CSIRO
scientists have been a bit naughty, attributing the success of the
diet to the increased intake of protein when in actual fact what
they've done is cleaned out most of the bread and pasta, and all of
the biscuits, cake, muesli bars, high sugar content breakfast
biscuits, nuts, donuts, lamingtons, chips, chocolate, buns, chips,
dips, ice-cream, juice and cool drinks, candy, liquorice, flavoured
milk ... Anyone who does that will be looking like a greyhound at
the end of six months.
Keeping it off is the problem, as
Nestles, Arnotts, Smiths, Coca Cola, Kelloggs, Cadburys, Nestle and
their barking dogs, the supermarkets,
petrol stations and news agencies go out of their way tempt
you into going back to your junk food way
of eating.
Before the Kelloggification and
Cocacolonization of this country, before it became fat, weak and
depressed, the standard evening meal was meat and three veg. The
CSIRO food technologists thought this sounded pretty right, dusted
the concept down, dressed it up and then tried it out on a hundred
muffin-topped female subjects. They liked it. They lost the weight
they'd found and felt better, the hallmarks of a good diet.
So, if you're a South Australian, live
in Toorak, drive a Volvo, work sitting down, wear a tweed skirt and
a twin set, shop at Demasius and spend the summer holidaying at
Chiton Rocks, this is the diet for you.
On the other hand, if you live in
Angle Park, wear tracky dacks and ugg boots, drive a 1975 Belmont
and shop at Arndale, I suggest if you want to lose weight, go the
the child's serve and leave the chips and gravy off your next
plateful of cutlets and
coleslaw.
Junk science
So what's it all about. Well for
starters it's based on junk research, meaning its research that
didn't need to be done again because it's been done to death a
thousand times over. Either the scientific memory in this country is
very short or academic information searching skills deficient. It's
an over-indulgent exercise on the part of the blue-eyed cod, salmon
and barramundi eating dieticians down on Kintore Avenue.
The world is awash with studies,
already done that point clearly in the direction we're being led in
this book. There is no doubt in my mind that the principles of the
diet are sound, but that's not the point. This is re-invention of
a wheel that's been rolling for close on 100 years. The team at the CSIRO could have recommended
people get the Zone Diet, or the walk-around-your-Hills-Hoist diet,
or buy a Women's Weekly recipe book at their local checkout and left
it at that. The plates of food presented in the Weekly look much
like those in the CSIRO book - good food, well presented, not a
biscuit, chip or block of chocolate in sight.
This is the CSIRO
minnow selling a couple of million dollars worth of books, trying to
compete with companies like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig who have
yearly incomes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. These
organisations, along with a host of reputable fat loss organisations
have already done the research and the hard yards in getting
satisfied customers back on the straight and narrow. This is
research that didn't need to be done. The CSIRO could have just
directed people to these organisations and left it at that.
You'll notice
though that the book doesn't contain a suggested reading list of
books they recommend. It doesn't contain a list of the organisations
they recommend you go to for support while you're losing fat off
your body. If they'd done that they would increased the usefulness
of the advice and dramatically reduced the cost of providing it.
There must be more important original
research to be done, research that is helpful to
people who want to eat wisely, have lots of energy and vitality and
maintain an ideal weight; - how to satisfy the inner hunger without
fattening yourself up, how to tame the Candida dragon, how to lower
insulin levels and how to overcome your addiction to flour and sugar
would seem to be the most urgent. In this country we've got a
discipline problem; but you'll be holding your breath for a long
time waiting for the definitive research study into over-coming
that.
Lay off junk food and fat drips off
people irregardless of how much they tinker with the percentage of
protein. You'll see in the book that the people who went on the
lower carbohydrate diet also lost weight, though not quite as much
as the higher protein eaters. Just get rid of junk, walk around the
Hills Hoist and you'll lose weight. QED.
A deficiency in this book is the lack
of explanation as to why junk foods aren't in the diet - that would
have been the real test of the diet, increase the protein but keep
the junk in. In fact it's short on explanation generally. Plus it is
always good to have a
definition of junk food handy to guide readers.
So what sets this diet apart (p.12)?
Well it's hard to work that one out from what the authors have to
say. What could have been spelt out in big letters was that this was
a diet low on refined carbohydrates and sugar, and stripped of junk
food.
The authors have backed away from
saying that. Instead they say that it is 'not a very low carb diet.'
Well that's not strictly true. They've stripped out most of the high
density carbohydrates - flour and sugar - that people are addicted
to and replaced them with low-energy-density vegetables and fruit.
All they can say is that 'What sets
the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet apart is that it has been tested on
hundreds of people since 1997 and is more than just a weight-loss
strategy; it is a protein plus, low fat eating plan that can help
you lose weight and keep it off.'
Well, hello!; there are a million
diets in bookshops and on the internet that do the same thing. And
it patronises all the diets that have been trialed on thousands of
people over many years, not by scientists but by people who found a
way to lose weight and wanted to share it with others.
The success of the CSIRO diet is it's restriction of the
two white powders - flour and sugar, and the encouragement of people
to eat more animal flesh.
If you get people to increase their
protein intake and lower their intake of flour and sugar they'll
lose weight, due principally to the fact that it takes more energy
to digest the protein than is in the protein. Plus it's the
stimulation of the production of insulin by the two white powders
that in turn stimulates the production of fat. That's Nutrition 101
science and it's been around for about 100 years.
If you stop people loading themselves
up on bread, pasta and sugar they'll lose weight. If you get them to
stop buying anything on the inside shelves of supermarkets they'll
lose weight.
(If you really want to seriously lose
weight, eat meat and tomatoes, and nothing else for a month. I've
seen it done and the people didn't die. They looked like a million
dollars.)
Tripe
A serious criticism is that it's a
jaundiced account of the ordinary fare that ordinary people ought to
be encouraged to eat. There's no mutton in this diet, just lamb, and
it's obviously not the diet that's going to appeal to big booffy
blokes who were brought up on brain patties and drool over a thought
of plate of tripe, steak and kidney, or lambs fry and onions. This
is middle class women's food; there's little in it for the working
class. All the subjects were women. All but a couple of photos in
the book are Sigrid and Olivia look-alikes.
On another serious note, the offal
meats have just about been stripped out of our diets thanks to diets
like this one and our health is suffering. Most women turn their
nose up at a good lambs fry and gag at the thought of tripe and
onions. Because of that, we're not getting the essential nutrients
that offal provides. We're starving on full stomachs. You'll have to
wait a long time before you'll get lambs fry back on your
supermarket shelves. It's gone.
There are only two places you'll get a
good lambs fry in Canberra, the Lachlan cafe on Brisbane Avenue, and
occasionally at the Southern Cross Club.
Eat like a sparrow
It will be exceptionally hard for a
lot of people to exist on the breakfasts that are suggested; 200gms
of yoghurt, a handful of breakfast biscuits ('Fibre Plus') and an
apple. How can you do a decent days work on that. There's no bubble
and squeak here, not a decent cooked breakfast in sight; that's
gone, thanks to the fat police.
Another point is that according to
Barry Sears in the Zone Diet there are good reasons to keep the
ratios of fat, protein and carbohydrate pretty constant for all
meals. In this one I can't see much fat in the breakfast, or protein
for that matter either. Maybe I'm missing something, and again, I'll
stand corrected.
It continues to amaze me the
dieticians refuse to encourage people to eat the same sort of meal
for breakfast as they eat for tea - instead the recommendation is
the usual communion-wafer-sized slice of toast, a piece of fruit, a
couple of tea spoons of yoghurt and some expensive, refined
cereal-based biscuits. It's not much better than a bushman's breakfast! I
find it hard to imagine why people are being encouraged to eat
biscuits for breakfast. And where's the porridge? That's been thrown
out too.
When it comes to breakfast there are
three schools of thought:
- one that says you need vegetables
and fruit before lunch
- another that this is the chance to
get some high fibre cereal; and fruit into your
body and
- another that says eat the same sort
of meal for breakfast as you do for tea.
Whatever you believe is right, I
suspect that breakfast ought to contain at least 25% of daily energy
needs.
Eat like a king for breakfast they
used to say. This diet is eat like a sparrow for breakfast - and
then sneak down for a muffin and flat white at 9.30!
The usual suspects are lined up for
lunch, with sandwiches coming in as the predominant choice. In our
culture bread is a convenience food. It would have been good to see
more of the non-bread lunch alternatives - particularly last night's
left-overs. It's only a lack of imagination and laziness that has us
choose the sandwich over something more substantial. You wouldn't
have a sandwich for tea so why have it for lunch?
The side show
The Glycemic Index had to be given a
run. Give this diet a big tick because it is definitely low GI
because of the lack of emphasis on bread, rice and pasta. Meat, fish
and chicken have a GI of 0.
The GI will always be a side show
while the low GI bar is set at 55. This diet encourages you to eat
at a much, much lower GI that that. It's one of the secrets of its
success.
The authors have come in for a
drubbing about the sponsorship of the research by the meat industry.
Interestingly though, the sponsorship by the dairy industry hasn't
attracted the same sort of criticism, despite wide-spread knowledge
(outside nutrition circles) about the undesirability of humans
drinking bovine milk and the calcium from that source not being in
the most readily absorbable form. We're currently in the grip of an
epidemic of irritable bowels, stimulated in large part by over
consumption of milk and wheat flour. This debate isn't pursued by
the authors.
Cracking the fat code
Have you noticed that the less fat
people are supposedly eating the fatter they're becoming. This is
because they usually substitute fat for flour and sugar.
As I said earlier, I suspect there is
not enough fat in the CSIRO diet. Everything is 'low fat', even the
milk which is already low in fat (around 5%) before they turn it
into lower fat milk. The meat is all trimmed of fat, the chicken of
skin. (Am I the only person who loves the skin on the chicken?)
People need fat in their diet or they
become depressed and arthritic; another epidemic. I doubt that this
diet contains the 26% of energy from fat as outlined in one of the
tables. I may be wrong and I'll stand to be corrected, but I can't
see much fat around.
Satisfying the inner hunger
Like most diets, this one doesn't talk
about why people have become overweight. My slant on this is that
you can't satisfy the inner hunger by eating. If you restrict
people's access to the food that's satisfying the inner hunger and
don't deal with and separate the inner hunger from the food, as
likely as not, in a couple of months time all the fat will have come
back on again.
It takes a monumental amount of
discipline to keep starving yourself of the foods to which you have
become addicted. A section on what to do about this would have been
a useful addition to the book.
Any diet that doesn't also address
this core issue relating to the satisfaction of the
inner hunger sells
it's customers short. It's easy to dash off a few recipes - tell
people to stop eating junk. It's a much tougher assignment cranking
up a personal development program that digs down deep into the
subconscious and unlocks the potential people have to eat to nourish
the cells of their body without fattening themselves up in the
process.
Books and programs addressing this
issue are around but because scientists from different disciplines
don't talk to each other, you'll have to go to the psychology
section for that one. Find out what's causing you to eat to excess
and fix that. Then the food will look after itself.
It stretches the imagination to call
this a total well-being diet.
To be called a 'Total Wellbeing Diet' without addressing the issue
of personal development and life circumstances leaves a big void in
the book. Let's face it, its a recipe book in which the concept of
wellbeing is trivialized by reducing it to eating and exercising.
A section could also have been written
exposing the junk food
industry, particularly that section whose products line the
inner shelves of super markets and who use play school presenters to
seduce children into the high flour and sugar way of eating.
However, when some of them sponsor the various nutrition
professional associations and get a tick from the heart charities
that's probably asking a bit too much.
The exercise prescription
The exercise section is glib. It's not
scientific. The recipe for exercise is particularly under done.
However, it's the exercise recipe that may well invalidate the
science that's supposedly underpins the success of the weight-loss
program.
Did everyone in the study do the same
amount of exercise? If it was me and I was in a study to see how
much weight I could lose I'd exercise like buggery. We could also
expect that the fattest people would lose the most weight because
the heavier you are, more energy you use up whenever you move,
regardless of whether or not it is an exercise training session.
Find out more about the
Exercise Prescription.
Selective evidence
The other piece of poor form is the
list of references, - very selective, in that all of them have one
thing in common, the name of the lead author of the book.
The thing about the science of dieting
is that for every bit of research suggesting one way of eating is
better than another, there are a dozen, if not hundreds saying you'd
be better off doing something else. In the end you have to sift
through all the stuff and do your own research on your own body. Lew
Hoad said, never change a winning serve. Once you find an eating
program that works for you, stick to it.
Fitness and Diet (FAD)
Have you ever noticed all the fad
diets around? No-one ever owns up to producing a fad diet, but every
one who writes one criticizes every other diet as being a fad diet.
The semi-final word; if you go on a
diet - any diet - you'll lose weight. If you maintain a bit of
discipline and don't eat too much junk, and in the spirit of the
CSIRO diet restrict your calorie intake, lay off
junk and eat more protein, you'll lose weight. If you
exercise you might lose it a bit quicker. That's science folks;
year 10 science!
Toorak delight
This book has been a delight to
review. I loved thumbing through the pages and
drooled over pictures of juienne sprigs of coriander, rocket
(correction, arugula) chopped rosemary,
baby capers, chopped, flat-leafed (italian)
parsley, bunches of baby bok choy, goats cheese and
watercress. This is real Aussie tucker!
What's good about the book is the way
the meals are dressed up and photographed, though the Women's Weekly
produces something similar every month.
A mate of mine says he'd got the book and though the menu's are
putting a dent in the housekeeping, they're easy to follow to the
point where he's racking up huge numbers of brown points. He said
some of them look like the meals dished up in flash restaurants and
not on your kitchen table, plus you can fill yourself up without
overdosing on bread, and spuds.
If you live
in Toorak,
Kensington or Beaumont, rush out and buy a copy, for yourself
(if you're a woman) or your wife (if you're a bloke.) It will cost
you $29.95 at the aerodrome and $18 at Big W. Or you can buy it from
the Health and Fitness Bookstore, which I highly recommend you do!
If you live in
Angle Park,
Kilburn or Wingfield buy the Women's Weekly or join Weight Watchers where, through trial,
error and observation on millions of people world-wide they worked
this one out 30 years ago. |
