How Many Ways Can We Say: Eat Well, Exercise, and Do It For Life?

Evidently we can say it to the tune of $48.7 billions dollars.  That's with a B, not an M, and that was for 2005 alone.  According to Forbes, lots of good diets exist.  There are many sites out there to rate the different diets, including those with reviews of the different diets.  I like the one I linked to because it focuses on the safety of diet plans.  A number of diets out there are just not a great idea in terms of your health. 

The most effective diet book I've ever read isn't a diet book at all.  It's the China Study, which goes over in detail the largest study ever done on diet and cancer.  The first part is intense because of his studies on rats and cancer production.  If you don't like that stuff, skip ahead to the huge studies on the Han Chinese, which provides conclusive evidence that diet activates or deactivates cancer. 

I guess the most disturbing thing about the book is that we haven't really shifted our diets to conform to what he found.  This was the big one.  I think they had 500,000 survey takers, and covered millions of people.  To paraphrase what he found, Campbell is now a vegan.  To give that context, he began life as a cattleman researcher, trying to find ways to increase our meat yields.  I still struggle to get my mind around what he found, and I still don't follow his diet.  But I keep trying, which is more than I can say of any other diet book I've read from years ago. 

Recycling from Weight Loss History: Simeons and HCG

Those who do not read history are doomed to spend their days starving themselves and giving themselves injections of pregnancy hormone.  Simeons' book has been rereleased, in large part due to Kevin Trudeau.  More importantly, now patients are able to buy pregnancy hormone over the counter.  It isn't very strong, but I wonder if it will lead to false positive pregnancy tests or people not realizing that they are pregnant.  I'm really not a fan, and I've written about why this should not be on your top one hundred possible ways to lose weight.  If you don't believe me (and you shouldn't believe anything you read on the web these days), have a look at the studies that have been done on Simeons work.  I have many ideas for weight loss that might actually work, and if you want to do a starvation diet of five hundred calories a day, for goodness sake do it with a trusted medical advisor.  Taking these drops and reading a book is really not a good idea. 

Lappe's Diet for A Small Planet

The forward of the first edition of this book influenced vegetarianism dramatically with its discussion of combining foods to create a whole protein at every meal.  What many vegetarians don't realize is that Lappe altered her forward with new nutritional information.  Her original assumption was that a complete protein was necessary at every meal based on the egg as the ideal human food.  But the body is capable of using different, incomplete proteins given to it throughout the day.  Some theorists claim it is possible to sustain human life with a constant diet as restrictive as just broccoli (Please don't try this.)  For most people, it gives freedom to not be concerned about protein malnutrition because they did not get their combinations right at every meal.