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Title: Dr. Atkins' Age-Defying Diet Revolution: A Powerful New Dietary Defense Against Aging by Robert C. Atkins, Sheila Buff ISBN: 0312977018 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: January, 2001 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4
Rating: 5
Summary: You need this book!
Comment: Dr Atkins has synthesized all off the latest research on nutrition and aging and has put together a up-to-date plan to help extend your life and improve the quality too. This is the best book on the subject since the bestselling classic, Life Extension, by Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, from the late '70's. The difference with Atkins book though, is that he cites a lot of credible research that will become accepted at some point by the medical community. He is ahead of his time as usual. The gist of the book is to tell readers what steps they need to take to promote heart and brain health, mostly through diet and readily available nutritional supplements. He contends that many of the most common diseases can be delayed or avoided by following his regimen. This is an important book, a gift from Dr. Atkins to people interested in their own healthful longevity.
Rating: 5
Summary: Offers valuable information on how to eat properly
Comment: For someone who was brought up believing that the way to dietary health and happiness was to avoid red meat, eggs, butter and saturated fats, and to load up on complex carbohydrates and use margarine, Dr. Atkins' ideas are indeed a revolution. In an incisive and extremely confident style, Dr. Atkins sets out what he believes are the components of a healthy diet for those of us past, say, fifty. First, "eat foods low in carbohydrates and high in antioxidants" (p. 277). These would be especially vegetables like kale, carrots, spinach, broccoli, etc. Second, eat natural fats and oils from butter, meat, fish, eggs, nuts and olive oil, and avoid all "trans fats" or highly processed fats in general. In fact, avoid highly processed foods of all kinds. Third, supplement your diet with what he calls "vitanutrients," i.e., vitamins like A, B, C, E etc. and minerals like zinc, calcium, etc., hormones like DHEA and melatonin, etc., and food supplements like ginseng, ginkgo biloba, etc.
Atkins himself is a medical doctor who practices alternative and complementary medicine. He is an enterprise himself with his many best-selling books and his Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine. When I first heard about him and his all protein and vegetable diet some years ago, I figured he was the charlatan author of yet another fad diet, and I ignored his books. This one is the first I've actually read, and I must say immediately that he is certainly not a charlatan. He is obviously a man who knows as much about diet as anyone could hope to know. Whether he is entirely correct in his ideas is not something I am incapable of assessing; but I am willing to bet he is mostly right. He has had an enormous experience treating patients, and it is encouraging to note that as a medical doctor he tends to write relatively few prescriptions. He even warns of the harm that can come from the use of commonly prescribed medicines and their side effects.
The most important claim he makes about ageing is that it is primarily caused by free radicals and that a diet high in antioxidants can reduce the number of free radicals in our bodies.
His central idea about diet is that it is not fats that are the enemy of health for people in the industrialized world (as we have so long been taught) but carbohydrates, especially highly processed ones. This is indeed a revolutionary idea, or at least it was when it was first expressed some years ago. Fat people are not fat because they eat too much fat. They are fat because they eat too many carbohydrates. When you think about it, especially from the point of view of evolutionary biology it suddenly makes enormous sense. What was it in the prehistory that we humans never had enough of to overindulge on? Not meat, and for many cultures, not fat, but carbohydrates. There were no fields of amber grain waiting to be harvested and made into flour and bread. There were no rice patties or acres of potatoes. Humans could fell a mammoth or an elephant seal once in a while and load up on meat and fat until they were sick of it, but there is no way they could have eaten enough wild wheat or barley to get sick of it. The sheer caloric expense of harvesting low-yield natural grains by hand prohibited any overdosing. It wasn't until the rise of agriculture about ten thousand years ago that we ever had enough of a carbohydrate to call it a staple of diet. Consequently, we are to some extent carbohydrate intolerant. This is an idea absent from popular books on nutrition twenty years ago, but a staple of the wisdom today.
I like the way Atkins explains how we came to this delusive state of dietary affairs in the first place, and how that delusion is maintained. The culprits are the mainstream medical establishment and the U.S. government working hand in hand to further the interests of vast agribusiness corporations who want to maintain a high public consumption of trans fats and highly refined carbohydrates. When you think about this, it also makes sense.
I also like how specific Atkins is. He names the foods and the vitanutrients and gives the amounts. He tells you how to work with your doctor (who, alas, may not be up on all the latest information) to put together a program for your specific needs. If nothing else, by reading this book you'll know how to ask some tough questions about diet and health that your doctor will have to respond to.
Agreeable too is the sardonic tone he takes with the medical establishment. For example on page 194 we find, "...Vitamin E enhances immunity. This has been a well-known fact among complementary practitioners for years, but perhaps now the information will trickle down to mainstream medicine, where this sort of knowledge is badly needed."
However, although the text is as readable as one would expect a popular book to be, especially with all the unavoidable abbreviations and acronym-filled detail, there is more than a little repetition. Additionally, Atkins and his assisting writer, Sheila Buff, have an annoying (to me) habit of beginning a chapter by telling the reader what they're going to say, saying it, and then telling the reader what they've said. On the other hand, that might be good; and anyway, who am I to second guess someone who has reached as many people with his books as has Dr. Atkins?
Rating: 4
Summary: Stick With It, It's Worth The Read!
Comment: This book starts out highly technical and hard to understand but as it progresses everything seems to tie together and is very much worth the read. See you at age 100!
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Title: Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution by Robert C. Atkins ISBN: 006001203X Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 04 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Dr. Atkins' New Carbohydrate Gram Counter by Robert C. Atkins ISBN: 0871318156 Publisher: M Evans & Co Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: Atkins for Life: The Complete Controlled Carb Program for Permanent Weight Loss and Good Health by Robert C. Atkins ISBN: 0312315228 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 20 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Dr. Atkins' Quick and Easy New Diet Cookbook by Robert C. Atkins, Veronica C. Atkins ISBN: 0684837013 Publisher: Fireside Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Dr. Atkins' Vita-Nutrient Solution : Nature's Answer to Drugs by Robert C. Atkins ISBN: 0684844885 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 07 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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