6th book of 2019. tl;dr: How Not to Diet is better, but this book isn’t bad.
After getting back into shape in 2019, I decided that 2020 would be the year that I start eating healthy. Little did I know that I would embark upon a minefield of controversy and pseudo-science. Finding worth reading was difficult; I ended up settling on this book and Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Greger’s thesis is simple: Eat more plants. He gives us three categories to think about food:
green light: unprocessed plant foods yellow light: processed plant foods + unprocessed animal products red light: processed animal products
Simple enough. More interesting is the mountain of data that Greger brings to support this case. Even as a pretty dedicated carnivore, I found the data convincing, I wasn’t able to find many critical reviews after searching. Even those critical of Greger have good things to say about the book: “How Not to Die contains treasures for members of any dietary persuasion. Its references are sprawling, its scope is vast, and its puns aren’t always bad. " (https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-not-to-die-review) Sidenote: some of the puns are really bad.
Sure some of the evidence is likely cherry-picked, but for a book with over 1000 references, that would be hard not to do. Crucially, I wasn’t able to find anybody able to make a convincing case refuting the book.
I’ve adopted Greger’s daily dozen as a waypost for healthy eating, any book that can change behavior quickly should get high marks. So why three stars?
The organization is atrocious. Greger starts the book going through the top 12 leading causes of death and the known contributing factors to each of them. I appreciate that he wants to make a point about meat and animal products, but after 4 chapters, it was repetitive and difficult to absorb. Think of it as the dietary fiber supplement of books - sure it has the fiber but there is no flavor, and I’d rather just eat whole grains. I had to read the book starting with the second half, then picking a few chapters in the first half that were interesting without reading them all. (Iatrogenic causes of death was a favorite, but it’s buried in the middle)
Second, Greger treats animal products like lord Voldermort, some shadowy figure seen in the background, but whose name must not be spoken directly. I wish that Greger went more in depth on processed foods and animal products to discuss the pros (there are probably a few? maybe one?) and cons knowing that his inevitable conclusion will be to eat as little meat as possible.
Third, I wish there was a little more global overview about how much all of this matters. The book promises telling us ‘how not to die’, but in the text we get scoped down to ‘how not to die prematurely’. I would have liked to know how premature? If I do everything right, do I get 10 years, 5, or just a day extra? There comes a point where I would agree with the science and still go for that slice of bacon, and a little more text about the big picture would have certainly helped.
Notes: ~cholesterol -> heart disease ~ldl should be under 70 ~if it came from plant eat it, if made in a plant, dont +iatrogenic causes -how much does this matter?