A diet that would bore you to death
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This book is unrealistic to say the least. To exist on vegetables, nuts and seeds, not much fruit, no meat, no dairy, and very little fish. You may drink water, juices made from vegetables and grasses and green drink. One also has to take lots of supplements, most of them I have never heard of. The authors also recommend a cleanse or fast before starting the diet of three to ten days.
I personally would NOT recommend this book. I think the way forward is to make a positive attempt to make the diet more alkaline, and we all know the optimum is 80/20. Can anyone recommend a book that deals with acid/alkaline balance in a more realistic fun way?
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Extreme Diet
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This is an extreme Vegan diet that goes against sound nutritional science. The Author claims you will lose wieght whilst taking in the same amount of calories, this will be so simply because many vegetables, especially green ones cost nearly as much or more in calories to digest than is released. So in effect its a low calorie diet. As soon as I got this book I tested my acid status both via saliva and urine; perfect, yet I am on a "normal" diet. I would worry about Iron because Iron found in vegetables is non heme iron (useless to the body) and whilst you can get a complete spread of amino acids on this diet, it is of a low biological value. Whey Protein has the highest biological value with eggs next but you won't be having either on this diet. The author is terrified of natural sugars (not just refined ones) and therefore kicks out honey and almost every fruit. Yet natural sugars are required for cell integrity and cell communication. He also kicks out mushrooms, yet mushrooms have powerful health giving and protection quantities. He harps on about organic food, well thats fine but more and more organic food is being grown in human waste and even blood products! I agree we should all eat more greens and much less meat but from a nutritionist point of view, especially a sports nutritionists, where pasta, rice and most grains are also excluded, this diet is a nightmare and I suspect that most people won't be able to stick to it. We are NOT grazing animals, we digest vegatable matter very poorly and nuts often worse (nuts come out of me, almost the same as they go in!). There are many other worries I have from a nutritional standpoint regards this diet, ala Alpha Lipoic Acid, crucial for the heart, suffiecient B12, Iron and other things. You might not die of heart disease but a lack of Alpha Lipoic Acid may result in premature heart ageing and heart failure eventually. My advice if your considering this diet is see a health professional first and a nutritionsist. If you want to balance your acid there are less extreme ways to do it.
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A lot of common sense
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This book makes sense of the chemistry of the human body. After only 3 weeks of drinking filtered water with added 'bleach' I have shed almost a stone, and feel better than I have done for years. It takes a little forward planning to maintain an interesting diet based on salads, but the clean fresh feeling inside is well worth it. Minimising sugary fruits also makes sense if one is suffering from a yeast infected gut, but with tomatoes, avocados,lemons, cherries and limes as recommended, and apples as acceptable, eating fruit is not a thing of the past. The book makes for good reading, especially the case testimonies.
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A Revelation
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I bought this book about 6 weeks ago and can honestly say it is one of my best ever "buys"! In spite of the fact that I have many books on nutrition and healthy cooking, I now realise that the "healthy eating" I have tried to maintain for years wasn't that healthy at all! Since making a few simple adjustments in line with the recommendations in this book, I have lost 15lbs in weight (and counting!) and experienced my energy levels and sense of general well-being soar.
Please take some of the "negative" reviews below with a generous pinch of salt. They misrepresent the programme by either presenting the recommendations for those attempting to heal themselves of extreme conditions, e.g. cancer, as being applicable to all (they are not) or take particular references so entirely out of context as to make them ridiculous (e.g. the bread recipe, below, which is actually used in the book as a quotation from the Dead Sea Scrolls and just shows the wisdom we have lost).
For your health's sake, buy this book and begin today. It may well be the best decision you make this year.
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Save your money
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If you are a person who rarely if ever eats vegetables and exists on processed foods then yes, this book might seem like a miracle, as the massive influx of good veggies and dropping the junk will do you a power of good. If you are a person who was already eating fruit, vegetables, whole grains and little or no processed foods then you will be startled, as I was, to be expected to drop nearly all fruit from your diet and add hydrogen peroxide to your drinking water. I prefer my water without added bleach thank you.
There is no index, the "references" at the back of the book could just be a list of books and papers that the author read in his lifetime as they do not seem to refer to specific parts of the book. He makes up his own words, for example "microforms" actually means microphotographic reproduction on film or paper of a document, but I presume he means to use it in the sense of microflora as he is keen to convey a picture of our bodies teeming with these sinister sounding microforms that he says "love to swim in their own waste products". To give him his due he did put the first use of his word "microforms" in quotation marks to indicate that he realizes that the word is not being used in its accepted sense. I could go on and on, touching upon where he got his credentials, the commercial aspect etc. but I will leave you with this handy recipe from the book, the bracketted comments are of course mine:
Sprout 2 cups of wheat for two days then grind (no rush then). Make a pad 1/8 inch thick from this dough (I presume you just add some water to make a dough or will it be moist enough? I don't know, he does not say)
Bake on a flat stone in full summer sun from morning until noon on one side, from noon until evening on the other side (I kid you not, what, you haven't got a flat stone? What, no garden, tut, pop out to the park, spend a day there while your bread bakes)or, if the weather is bad, bake in a slow oven until slightly crisp (well that's an option on a rainy day.) The last line of the recipe says "This is a tasty, hard tack like bread." (yum)
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