Found: The Perfect Diet! (Not)
by
|
A |
fter winning three Orson Welles look-a-like contests in a row, I decided it was time to look into the issue of adjusting my dietary causes to achieve different dietary effects. I was tired of showing up alone and being offered the group rate on things. It didn’t help when the bag boy at the supermarket asked me if I wanted help to my car. My bag contained two small tomatoes. The final insult was when someone asked me if I’d had my prescription underwear renewed lately. Apparently they detected some sag.
In looking into diet schemes, I had two goals: more health and less weight. I realized that the two went body-in-girdle with each other. But I’d rather be fat and healthy than lean and sickly. Ideally, I’d like to weigh a muscular 175 pounds and be in perfect health for my age (103). But 175 pounds is a long way to go from 605. Fortunately I don’t have to go that far, but I’m sure someone does.
If you study diet books closely, as I have, you’ll realize that you could die of an unanticipated disease: diet book frustration syndrome (DBFS). Here’s the problem: they all seem to cancel each other out. Let’s look at some examples.
Forget it. Let’s not try to document all of the differences between the gurus. That project could turn encyclopedic in a hurry. This is only a column, not a tome. Suffice it to say that the high-protein/low carbohydrate people stress meat, fish, poultry and dairy products, along with green leafy leaves, but they eschew carbs, especially if they’re high on the glycemic scale.
The veggie-nuts stress beans and leaves while rejecting all animal products.
The lacto-oval (or is it Ovo?) vegetarians also reject flesh, but eat dairy products with impunity.
The food combination crowd tells us not to eat meat and starch together; this despite Jesus serving of bread and fish together.
The PH people want us to eat 80% alkaline-reacting foods and only 20% acid-reacting foods (your PH should test slightly alkaline). That lets out high-protein diets like Atkins and Protein Power.
The low carb people are death on fruit, except on rare occasions – like a little in the morning. The Food for Life people say we should eat only fruit in the morning.
Some gurus
advise us to drink all the fresh carrot juice we can squeeze, and throw in some
beets for good measure. Others insist that we shouldn’t eat corn, beets or
potatoes in any form – too high in sugars. A third juice guru solves the sugar
problem by diluting the juice by half with water. Don’t tell Charlotte Gerson or Jack Lalanne I told you
all this! Ms. Gerson has been drinking
If you run from the sugar busters, you’ll run into the fat busters, or the protein busters or some other kind of buster.
You might discover the 120-year diet. It works on the valid principle of calorie light but nutrient dense meals. Problem is, the recipes are so complicated it could take you 120 years to prepare one, and by that time you’d have starved to death.
This is a
no-win research project. None of the experts seem to be in sync with each as to
what constitutes the healthiest human diet – or the one that’s best for losing
fat without losing muscle. The Mediterranean diet claims to be the world’s
healthiest, especially as practiced on the
A new bodybuilding magazine is trying to go one better – it promotes the Mediterr-Asian Diet. It supposedly combines the two healthiest diets in the world. But watch out for those Sushi parasites!
I think I’ve lost about 10 pounds just from the effort of studying all these books and trying to make sense of them. Why can’t the diet gurus arrive at a consensus about what’s the right way to eat for the rest of us sick sods? We know that we can’t trust the Gov’mint to give us good dietary advice. Its last food pyramid caused most Americans to become shaped like pyramids. So much for the high-carb/low fat model.
In a hot flash of inspiration, I realized why the gurus couldn’t agree with each other: they’re all selling books! If all of them said the same thing, there’d only be a need for one book, and only the people who wrote it would make the bucks. If you’re going to write a diet book and become a guru, you have to say something different from what everyone else is saying and it has to be unique and special.
Oh, I forgot to mention the celebrity diet books. People read those because they want to know how the stars keep from looking like the rest of us.
After
building a small library of diet and health books, here are some random
thoughts on health and diet. I offer them on a “for what they’re worth” basis.
They might work for me as a group. If you want to send money, send it to the
Home for Burnt Out Dieters in
Since we are attempting to be a Biblical people, we ought to consider at least some of the things the Bible says about food.
It is commonly believed in Jewish circles that man’s original diet from the time of Adam to Noah was vegetarian (cf. Genesis 29,15). After the flood, Noah and his descendants were given permission to eat flesh (Genesis 9:2-3), though they were forbidden to consume blood (verse 4). So post-Noahic man was given flesh, vegetables and fruit to eat, sans blood. The fear of man was now universal within the animal world (verse 2). So we learn that it is now okay to eat all these things, but that was a compromise with the Edenic ideal. In the world to come, man will again revert to a vegetarian diet. (For further study, check out Umberto Cazzuto’s excellent commentary on Genesis, Volume I, on the verses above.)
God gave man the right to eat protein, fats and carbohydrates – the three food groups. But he warned that man must not be cruel to the animals he chose to slaughter for food (Genesis 9:4).
Though the food combining people don’t like it, Jesus served bread and fish at the same meal. In his first miracle, he turned water into excellent wine. The Bible also says to “give strong drink to those who are about to perish.” It you check the Hebrew; you’ll find that it means something you could get drunk on (BDB, p. 1016b).
God led the Israelites into a land of “milk & honey.” I’m sure he didn’t lead them there to have them avoid both. And of course he may have talking about goat’s milk here too. Remember, there are those who teach that it is unnatural for adults to drink milk, and that children should only drink mother’s milk. But if cow’s milk is unnatural, why is goat’s milk natural?
Once the
priesthood was established in
Of course Daniel ate “pulse” and thrived on it, while those who consumed “the king’s dainties” probably developed gout, diabetes and too much gross tonnage.
Then there’s good ol’ Ezekiel 4:6 bread.
John the Baptist ate “locusts and wild honey.” The latter probably made the former taste better, but the low-carb people wouldn’t approve of the honey part.
Personally, I’m not into bottom feeders and scavengers for food. Things like shellfish, catfish, scorpions, caterpillars, Gila monsters, pigs, bears and rhinoceros are not on my menu. And once I find out about it, I avoid restaurants that serve cats for chicken. And unless I’m short on my MDR of parasites, I avoid sushi.
I still follow the guidelines of Leviticus 11 when it comes to food – not because I feel that I, as a Gentile Christian, am “under” that set of permissions and prohibitions – but because I think God gave his chosen people the best menu.
Now having said all that, and offended some by saying that I’m a “Gentile Christian” (and not an “Ephraimite”), here’s what I’ve provisionally decided when it comes to food, health and exercise:
The Calorie Counter by Annette B. Natow, PhD, R.D. & Jo-Ann Heslin, M.A., R.D.
The Corrine T. Netzer Carbohydrate Counter (revised and updated 7th edition or later)
The Corrine T. Netzer
Dieter’s Diary
Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives by Ruth Winter, M.S.