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Death By Food Pyramid (2014)

by Denise Minger(Favorite Author)

4.23 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0984755128 (ISBN13: 9780984755127)

languge

English

genre

Humor

publisher

Primal Nutrition

review 1: I must admit to not understanding everything in Death by Food Pyramid but I understand enough to be angry. I can just hear my Dad's frequent cautions "not to believe everything you read" and now I wonder if there's ANYTHING you can believe when it comes to health and nutrition. Minger's recounting of the food pyramid's background illustrates government at its worst where compromises in the wrong areas have compromised our health. I think there were many involved who had the best of intentions but in the end, it seems to have done more to put us in our current state of obesity, quick fixes and health by prescription than to have created a healthy, empowered citizenry. I guess the only thing you can do is trust your "gut" (literally) and pay close attention to the foods that... more make you feel satisfied and strong and avoid those that just seem to make you want more.
review 2: I feel conflicted about this book. Denise Minger is a brilliant writer, and in my view her work is better suited to book form than the long blog entries she posts a few times per year. The beginning of this book does a great job of laying out how we got where we are today, and though this has been done before in many books (e.g. Food Politics by Marion Nestle), Minger puts her own spin on it. I thought she was far more balanced than I expected. As a revered figure in the ancestral health/paleo community - who became so because of a massive debunking of The China Study - I expected a book a bit more like her 'colleagues' in this community who have also published books. She provides, instead, a much more balanced view of contested figures like Ancel Keys and his nemesis. Yet as the book progresses, Minger slips a bit, and begins using more logical fallacies. She is suddenly much more positive in her take on observational data, and though she still dances around people like Price by caveating their work, the tone completely changes. She begins the "Meet your Meat" chapter with a disclaimer that she rarely eats land animals, but doesn't begin the "Herbivores Dilemma" chapter with a similar caveat that the paleo community is what got her to where she is today. Though her presentation of different diets is much more balanced than you will read in the blogosphere, it is clear that there is a shift in the standard of evidence that she believes is needed to support her personal conclusions from the research. She's still fairly reserved in those conclusions, but I think she should have been a bit more reflective on how she used the research to support her pre-existing beliefs. Still, this is a well written book that deals with a lot of important topics, and I was happy to see that Minger did not completely throw other diets (including whole foods plant based diets) completely under the bus in crafting this book. It's worth reading, but I would exercise as much caution in reading her own take on nutrition as you do in reading about those individuals and agencies that had a hand in crafting USDA recommendations, as they are still built on a very shallow and shaky foundation of research. less

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