Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health Hardcover – January 1, 2014

I wish this book had been written earlier, and I completely agree with her conclusions, they are what I've come to over the past few years. My story is similar. Get the book, read it and avoid the trouble I've been thru. For more read Eat the Yolks.Eat the Yolks: Discover Paleo, fight food lies, and reclaim your health and Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About ItI lost my health doing what I was told. More whole grains, move to a vegetarian diet, low fat. The recommended way to eat circa the late 80's on. As a young wife and mother I wanted to do best for my husband and family. As an RN I followed the health guidelines of the day to the letter.Fat was demonized so non stick Teflon and spray PAM was in. I bought that and "healthy" soft margarine. Fat was supposed to make you fat and the worst fat of all was animal fat so I bought and served only lean meats and less of that as we as a family moved to a vegetarian then a vegan diet.We ate "clean". We ate lots of whole grains, I ground the wheat for the bread we ate myself. Fresh ground whole grain wheat. We ate beans, lentils, legumes and soy. We moved away from dairy and towards soy milk, soy cheese and soy burgers.We got worse. We all gained weight, our teenagers developed migraines, and their allergies got worse. Rashes, asthma, frequent infections. I got sick, fatigued, and my joint pain was agonizing, my husband got high blood pressure, high triglycerides and high cholesterol. My thyroid finally blew up like a balloon.I started to read and began to suspect soy and legumes might be part of it. Finally I quit all legumes and my joint pain cleared up. We managed a while but other things got worse, and I developed a worsening of my auto immune symptoms. I had surgery to remove half my thyroid, and suffered with worsening female issues (fibroids and endometriosis) and a subsequent hysterectomy. While treating each problem helped, it didn't bring me back to full health. Puzzling. But when I reintroduced a test of soy, my joint pain came back right away, and my remaining thyroid swelled up and became painful. The same thing when I tried various other legumes like lentils, peanuts and dried beans. So soy and legumes were out altogether. Still tried to stick to low fat, and the weight continued to climb for both my husband and myself.Along the way I bumped into Anne Barone's Chic and Slim books Chic & Slim: How Those Chic French Women Eat All That Rich Food And Still Stay Slim and started to change my diet some more. I added in butter, cheese and eggs and got a little better and lost some weight but I was struggling with fatigue, falling down frequently, ataxia (walking like a drunk) and intermittent numbness. This was the first part of the puzzle for me, why the French eat so much fat and stay slim.Finally I found a book by Gary Taubes on Why we are fat and in it I found out that my auto immune problems may have been CAUSED by the low fat, whole grain diet. I went on the low carb diet, did more reading, lost weight, gained energy and began to see some hope. At that time I noticed that most of the French diets were lower carb, more Zone like. I also noticed that much of the whole French and Italian, Greek, Med diet research seemed awfully different as the reporters defined it, versus what I was actually seeing in cookbooks written before the low fat craze. These cultures PRIZED certain fatty meat cuts, and the ones that relied more on beans and pastas tended to have more belly fat in their photos. So the slimmest of the Italians and Greeks were eating like the slimmer French.I read about the China Study, it scared me because who was I to believe? Obviously everyone from Jane Brody in the eighties to the recent China Study said you should NEVER EVER consider a high fat and protein diet lowered in carbs.But my husbands cholesterol and tri glycerides and weight were coming down and so was my weight and my cholesterol and my blood pressure which had all rocketed up in the last years of "healthy eating".So with fear and trembling my husband and I continued down our carnivorous ways. We enjoyed our way thru some fun French and Italian cookbooks, leaving the bread and pasta behind.I noticed that when grains were out of the picture my body and his worked better. (our kids are adults now, and finding the same things).When I cut gluten out, my childhood eczema that had persisted thru adulthood disappeared completely. I had a genetic test for celiac, and I'm not a celiac, but I sure have problems adding gluten back into the mix. The eczema comes right back and my body attacks itself a lot more with the auto immune stuff.I'd love to say I'm back in perfect shape but 30 years of damage aren't erased. I'm better than I was but I think some of the damage is permanent. I will be on a lower carb gluten free almost paleo but with high fat dairy for life. So will my husband. Our kids are able to tolerate a bit more of the whole grains and legumes but they too are off the low fat bandwagon and eat meat along with the fat that comes with it. Our lab work confirms this is a much healthier eating pattern. The cholesterol ratio, triglycerides and our weights are all in the healthy range even though I still struggle a bit with fatigue and auto immune problems. my BMI is still higher than I'd like but I've lost 30 lbs and kept it off for years now. I'm down from a size 24/26 to a 14-16. I am completely off cholesterol and blood pressure meds and my blood tests show completely normal values now, while my husband is on a much lower dose of a statin and blood pressure medication. His BMI is now in the normal range, and the dr is very happy with his labwork results. He is no longer trending towards type 2 diabetes, his blood sugars and triglycerides are completely normal. Both of us have lost the worst of our belly fat with some still to lose.I hope if you are reading this review, that you will get this book, and thoughtfully and carefully examine what she is saying and save your own health and the health of those around you.

This is a really fine book on the topic of nutrition. Minger, whose health was injured seriously at a young age by well meaning but ill considered nutrition choices, looks at the science of nutrition through the prism of various failed government attempts to recommend good nutrition. As there have been more and more government attempts across the world to recommend nutrition, our health has become worse. While many of the people involved in these attempts may have been well meaning, the outcome of these attempts (from the old nutrition pyramid to the current efforts for nutritional labeling of packaged foods, have generally failed. There has never been more interest in nutritional labeling than in the last 40 years and there has never been a higher incidence of deterioration of health based on poor nutrition than in the past 40 years. That conundrum is the focus of this fine book.The book includes a brief primer on how to read and research the actual science of nutrition. I found this very useful. In addition, Minger does an excellent job of citing the actual science and then explaining what it means in non scientific terms.As Minger sees it, there have been some real problems with focusing research into the effects of nutrition on a single macronutrient (be it fat. carbohydrate, protein, etc.) and in trying to study these macronutrients in isolation without trying to understand how all of the nutrients we consume interact. In addition, Minger highlights the failure to appreciate the genetic diversity within how different people process nutrients and the effort to study nutrition in isolation to other lifestyle factors as fundamental flaws in the science that led us to where we are.Minger makes an important point in observing that research into nutrition really remains a work in progress, we really do not fully understand how some of the processes work and anyone who claims complete knowledge of nutrition is either mistaken or misleading. At our present level of knowledge, there really are no silver bullets out there.Minger does make some specific recommendations that I think bear repeating. These include:Be very suspect of industrial heavily processed food and the products of industrial farmingBe very suspect of the use of heavily processed vegetable oilsBe very suspect of the health claims made by industrial food producersBe aware that government nutrition recommendations are as often based on a political process more than a scientific processBe aware that the various areas of the world that have a very low incidence of food related illness tend to have some very different dietsDon't be afraid of animal based fats (in moderation)Remember that animals have other edible parts besides the 'prime' muscle meatsBalance your diet to make sure you are getting enough of the fat soluble vitamins (very important because these effect so much else)Balance nutrition with other elements of a healthy lifestyle including stress control, appropriate physical activity and other factorsA very good read. Strongly recommended.