Trick and Treat

[T.C.]

Just got a new book called Trick and Treat: how 'healthy eating' is making us ill by Barry Groves, and I can't put it down.

A great book that shatters so many of the nutritional fantasies and fads of the last twenty years. Read it and prolong your life.' Clarissa Dickson Wright

Do you practice 'healthy eating', consuming your 'five portions of fruit and vegetables ' per day and shunning fats in favour of complex carbohydrates?

Then you could be doing exactly what is most harmful to your health and helping to support one of the worlds biggest and most lucrative industries - the healthcare industry.

Trick and Treat asks the key questions:

* has 'healthy eating' coincided with a reduction in health problems and health spending?
* who benefits from the effects of 'healthy eating?'
* what is the evidence to support the principles of 'healthy eating'?
* if 'healthy eating' isn't healthy, what is?

Bringing together over a century of relevant findings, including classic papers and the latest research, Barry Groves examines each of these issues in depth and concludes that there is a simple, evidence-based alternative approach that will allow us to take charge of our own health.



Barry groves can claim to be Britain's leading exponent of the low-carb way of life, having researches, lectured and written about this subject, and lived according to it's principles, since 1962. When his dietary regime was designated 'unhealthy' by the healthcare establishment in the 1970's, this led Barry to question conventional wisdom on nutrition and health. In 1982 he took up full-time research into the role of diet in diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. His researches form the basis of this book.

From the introduction:

Part one of this book sets out the extent of the corruption of the 'health industry'; it shows how current 'healthy' dietary guidelines are based more on myth and wishful thinking than any coherent body of scientific evidence. And it gives the evidence for what we should really eat for health.

Part two lists over 70 common, chronic, degenerative diseases. They range from the serious, such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and senile dementia, to the less serious but no less distressing like acne and short-sightedness in children. This second part gives evidence that these diseases owe their recent rise in numbers to the diet we are all told to eat.

I am not a medical practitioner and the contents of this book are not based on my ideas. For the most part I simply report the results of research that recognised authorities - scientists, doctors and nutritionists - have carried out. Their findings and their conclusions are a matter or record in the major medical journals. What I have done is to collate them in a way which, I hope, you will find both interesting and informative. Three things I can promise: a rare opportunity to hear the other side of the health argument, a rare opportunity to learn the truth and an opportunity to be healthy again.

Another sentence which suggests this book may be one for all our shelves is where he talks about there being ample evidence that many health problems can be "helped merely by reducing the carbohydrate content of your diet and replacing it with fat".

The book is about 500 pages and has over 50 pages of references in the back. I'll update the thread as I read the book.

 

[realitybugll]

Looks interesting. I like this claim: "helped merely by reducing the carbohydrate content of your diet and replacing it with fat". I would like to believe it to be true, because my diet has a lot higher percentages of fat than carbohydrates compared to before. but I am not in ketosis by any means.

I wonder what his take is on animal fats vs plant based fats is...