Perfect Health Diet: Four Steps to Renewed Health, Youthful Vitality, and Long Life [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The Perfect Health Diet is an extremely well referenced and supported diet book. I have read maybe fifty health and nutrition books, many in the "low carb", "paleo", "traditional eating" and "whole foods" categories. This book is the best that I have read. Every issue is discussed in detail.

The end product is a diet that has similar macronutrient ratios to Pacific islanders with high levels of longevity and resistance to disease. How they deduce that such a diet is optimal is pretty interesting. The authors use the premise that your body can convert one type of macronutrient to another, but such conversion may not be optimal. Why go completely high protein when your body will just make glucose from protein? Why go high carb when the carbohydrates above 600 calories a day are converted to saturated fat? The authors also point to the nutrients in human milk as evidence on what might be optimal to eat. The discussion of macronutrients (fats, proteins, carbohydrates) was the most detailed I have seen in any nutrition book for a non-professional audience.

The diet is a "paleolithic" diet in that it suggests avoiding food toxins such as fructose (sugar), grains other than white rice, legumes and omega 6 polyunsaturated fatty acids. The book is quite specific about the evidence on these toxins. The diet is fine with so-called "safe starches", such as potatoes and white rice. It ends up being a high fat diet by calories as protein and carbohydrates are given generous upper bounds. Coconut oil is praised.

A section on supplements gives reasonable advice to focus on a few key nutrients and to avoid a few other common supplements. All the advice is quite reasonable.

Readers who still need to be convinced that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol are not the causes of heart disease might start with a more basic book that fights all the introductory fights (Good Calories, Bad Calories by Taubes is one, albeit lengthy suggestion). But for someone buying into the basic paradigm and looking to optimize their own health through nutrition, the Perfect Health Diet is the best book to buy.

I had been eating (very) low-carb and high-protein for the better part of a decade - and I had gotten a lot of practice arrogantly dismissing suggestions (from any source) that I should change anything about my diet.

It is a testimony to the insightfulness of this book that it persuaded me to change.

How was I persuaded?

* The Jaminets are highly educated (Ph.D.s both), but not they're not nutritionists and are not bound by any party line.
* They amass a huge volume of scientific literature in support of their assertions - about 1/3 of every page is journal citations.
* They write clearly, and are clearly motivated by a desire to share the keys they've discovered for better health.
* Time after time, while reading, I exclaimed "so *that's* why!" - there's an overarching framework they build, and after reading it I have a much broader and deeper understanding of health and nutrition.

The changes I made were:
1. Eat a modest amount (15-20%) of calories as carbs from what they call "safe starches" (rice & potatoes in my case.)
2. Eat a large (~70%) of calories from fat. In particular, I consume dramatically more butter (kerrygold!), and I've added a fair bit of coconut oil too.
3. (As a result, the amount of protein I eat has dropped somewhat.)
4. Supplementing with a mix of the vitamins they recommend.
5. Doing a 24-hour fast once a week.

Results: (after 1.5 months or so.)
1. I'm no longer "brain-dead" and unable to think in the evenings after work.
2. I no longer have fruit or chocolate cravings.
3. I'm much happier, and wake up looking forward to the day.
4. I've been much more social.
5. The extra starch has not resulted in weight gain. (I always gained weight when eating carbs before.)
6. It looks like the fasting (which I've never tried before) is helping my alertness and also contributing to healthy weight loss.

It took less than a week for me to notice dramatic changes. The diet guidelines are straightforward and fit on a page, but the explanatory material is priceless. The Jaminets post on an ongoing basis at their perfecthealthdiet dot com blog as well.

I can't recommend this book highly enough.

I am a former long-time vegetarian who has turned to a paleo-style diet in an attempt to treat chronic fatigue and autoimmune issues. The diet I follow is almost identical to the Perfect Health Diet, and I learned a lot from this book, especially about the importance of short-chain fatty acids, the role of fiber in a healthy diet, the reactivity of sugars, and ketogenic fasting. However, I am giving the book only two stars because a) I am deducting a star because the book lacks an index; and b) the authors claim that food toxins are found exclusively in non-paleo foods, and ignore the toxicity of animal products.

The authors base their prohibitions of grains, legumes and vegetable oils on the concept of toxins inherent in these foods which cause various forms of damage to the body. However, they do not address the fact that environmental toxins accumulate in fat tissue, so unless you're eating animals that ate food that was never touched by pesticides, drank filtered water, lived in uncontamined bodies of water, or breathed filtered air, you're eating the chemicals that accumulated in their bodies. Animal liver, which the Jaminets recommend eating weekly, will contain even higher levels of toxins than fatty tissue, because the job of the liver is to filter toxins. Even though I eat only naturally-fed, humanely-raised animal products, I try to protect myself from the environmental toxins that will inevitably end up in those foods by taking chlorella and regularly going to the sauna. A good detox strategy is an essential part of modern-day paleo eating on our filthy planet. Within the context of our food system, it is certainly not true to say that "animal foods are generally non-toxic" (p.120).

I believe that the only mention of environmental toxins in this book is a recommendation not to eat tuna and swordfish because they are more likely to be contaminated than fish such as salmon and herring. But then the Jaminets go on to recommend eating farmed salmon, which researchers have found to contain much higher levels of PCBs, dioxins, and pesticides than wild salmon. The researchers, at the University at Albany Institute for Health and the Environment, recommend limiting consumption of farmed salmon to once or twice a month, based on EPA guidelines. (The Jaminets would have you eat up to a pound a week).

Farmed fish is acceptable to the Jaminets, as is feedlot beef, because it is naturally low in omega-6 fatty acids. And while they say it might be nice to buy pastured poultry and eggs, because the EFA ratio is better, it's more important to limit your consumption to a few times a week. According to the Jaminets, "animal foods should be selected for their fat content" (111). There is no discussion anywhere in this book of any other health problems associated with eating factory-farmed animal foods, and not a whisper of any environmental or moral reasons to choose naturally-raised animal products. It seems the Jaminets have focused their research so narrowly on technical questions of nutrition, that they really don't know much about the larger context of food production. For example, they seem to think that free-range chickens eat only "vegetables and insects, not cereal grains" (p. 110), but it's really not possible to raise healthy pastured chickens without supplementing their diet with feed. And in encouraging vegetarians to eat eggs and dairy, they claim that "no animals are killed to obtain these foods" (p. 269). As every vegan knows, almost all male chicks and calves in the egg and dairy industries are killed. They've never heard the slogan "veal depends on dairy"? They're not going to convince any vegans this way.

Animal products contain some inherent toxins too: considering the vast amount of research that went into this book, it's hard to believe that the authors missed the news about heme iron (the kind found in red meat): it has been found to form carcinogenic compounds in the gut (although research is inconclusive yet about whether eating fresh, unprocessed red meat causes colon cancer). However, this damage has been observed to be countered by the presence of chlorophyll in the gut. So to protect myself from this toxin, I always eat green, leafy vegetables at the same time I eat red meat. The authors do suggest always cooking meat with vegetables, but a more balanced book would have discussed the toxicity of heme iron. They do mention the opioid-like peptides, allergens, and naturally-occuring hormones found in milk, and they warn against copper build-up from eating too much beef liver.

In addition to environmental toxins, anyone contemplating buying some random piece of meat at Kroger's should know what else is likely to be in there: antibiotics and hormones, dyes, additives, etc. Oh, and that it was irradiated to kill the nasty things that result from feeding animals food they weren't designed to eat and from filthy industrial slaughterhouses. But if we are to believe the Jaminets, it's perfectly safe to eat animals that have eaten GMO corn and soy, although we ourselves should not eat anything genetically modified. According to them, "the best way to detoxify genetically modified grains" is to "let animals eat them first" (p. 156). In this heavily foot-noted book, this statement conspicuously lacks any references, such as studies comparing the tissue of animals that ate GMO feed vs. non-GMO feed. The Jaminets did, after all, just get done telling us that "such is the complexity of biology that seemingly innocuous genetic alterations can have far-reaching effects" (p.156).

I noticed a few other convenient inconsistencies which raised a flicker on my BS-detector and reduced my trust in the authors: on page 75 we read that Americans eat 3770 calories a day (roughly accurate, as of 2002, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization); but on page 174, to bolster their argument that Americans are undernourished, they claim that the average male "modern office worker" eats 2560 calories per day and his female co-worker a mere 1760 calories. In the section on grains, they tell us that because eating wheat germ increases stool weight, that means that eating wheat causes "large amounts of food to be excreted instead of digested" (p.123), although anyone who has read the section on fiber might wonder if that extra stool weight is actually made up of gut bacteria that proliferated feeding on the fiber. And it was just plain weird to see them recommending spirulina as a source of long-chain omega-3s for vegetarians, since spirulina is known to produce neurotoxins, something you'd think the authors would know about.

For anyone interested in paleo-style eating, I do recommend this book for its fascinating technical content; however, it needs to be placed within the larger context of industrial food production. There are many books covering that subject: Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma go in-depth; The Butcher's Guide to Well-Raised Meat gives a quick overview, and tells you what to do with your relatively non-toxic, ethically-produced meat.