nutritionism
omg let me lighten your bank account
I don’t aspire to be a “lifestyle” guru, review books, articles such as this or aim to write one, however I’ve been chewing it over for a week and… personally I’d ban prescriptive “lifestyle” books for misleading claims. Is there a legal loophole for dodgy authors’ claims which doesn’t exist for product advertisers? Surely such a prescriptive style book is a product?
The low lights of Six Weeks to OMG
- Author uses the words “extra chunk” and “get skinnier than all your friends”
- Author claims “broccoli carbs can be worse than those from Coke”
Googling took me to the king of the carb counters Atkins, and:
Cola, 12 fl oz - carbs: 35.6g, *net carbs: 35.6g. Broccoli florets, raw ½ cup - carbs: 2.4g, net carbs: 1.5g. Broccoli frozen, chopped, steamed, ½ cup – carbs: 4.9g, net carbs:2.2g. Broccoli Dishes Bird's Eye Broccoli w/ Cheese Sauce, ½ cup – carbs: 7.1g, net carbs: 5.2g. Broccoli Dishes Bird's Eye Green Giant Broccoli & Three Cheese Sauce, ½ cup – carbs: 7g, net carbs: 5g. Broccoli rabe, raw, ½ cup – carbs: 0.6g, net carbs: 0.1g. Broccolini, steamed, ½ cup – carbs: 8g, net carbs: 6.7g.
You could consume half a cup of each of the different broccoli and still not have ingested the same amount of carbs, net or otherwise as 12 fl oz of cola.
- And, “skip breakfast… because it gives us the chance to live off our supply of body fat”
Until when? - Plus, “give your metabolism a cold hard wake-up call with an icy bath each morning”
Until hypothermia sets in? - Also, author “says he was frustrated ‘watching people pour their effort into old-fashioned diets destined to fail; and … knowing that there were solutions that no-one had the guts to put forward’ ”
He’s amusing himself by concocting a new fashion diet he can watch people fail at? - And this, “People are fed up with being told what to do, without being told why. I don’t have recipes in the book, because I know by the time readers reach the last page, they’ll know how to do things themselves.”
Of course they do, but he’s hoping they’ll part with their cash for his book anyway.
Only $2.99 on Kindle for all this wisdom, which I think is $2.97 too much allowing it the same 2 cents value as my opinion of the SMH article about his book. This is news?
Articles & books like this feed off people such as an acquaintance, who’d been telling me she’d stopped walking, her only form of exercise because she was bored, and sent me an email: “Have you heard of this lady? I love some of her exercises I’ve seen on utube (sic). I haven’t read this but it’s her view on walking technique”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/11/walking-techniques-by-joanna-hall
Me: I just walk.
Akin to generic I.T. advice to switch your computer off & on again for any given issue, “everything in moderation” although boring & trite covers off a lot of commonsense, not just about diet & exercise, but life in general and how we critique ourselves.
The final word comes from a my 7 year old reading pupil last week as we were perusing the 2006 Guinness Book of World Records and came across an entry for what I think was **World’s Largest Man, “he’s not large he’s fat”… There was no judgement in it, just stating facts.
*"Net carbohydrates can be calculated from a food source by subtracting fibre and sugar alcohols (which are shown to have a smaller effect on blood sugar levels) from total carbohydrates." Wiki **Googling this didn’t find any results for verification. Ahhh 2006, the dark ages.
