SERVES PER DAY

SERVES PER DAY

MUTTON DRESSED UP AS LAMB

This beautifully presented recipe book, masquerading as the CSIRO Total Well-being Diet, was published late in 2005, and since then has taken Australia by storm. Hundreds of thousands of people have rushed out and bought it, saving the CSIRO from the clutches of KordaMentha and Co.

A few chest-puffing dieticians and doctors bagged it because it suggests you can have a few decent serves of meat a week instead of the National Dietary Guidelines recommended dose of a few thimble fulls. However, it's more likely that the National Guidelines are out of whack, rather than the Total Wellbeing Diet.

Let's make no bones about it, if you stick with this diet you'll lose weight and feel great.

In fact if you stick with any diet that strips out the junk you'll lose weight. And stripping out junk is what Manny and her mates, to their credit have done.

Junk food

In actual fact, I think the CSIRO scientists have been a bit naughty, attributing the success of the diet to the increased intake of protein when in actual fact what they've done is cleaned out most of the junk - bread and pasta, all of the biscuits, cake, muesli bars, high sugar content breakfast biscuits, nuts, donuts, lamingtons, chips, chocolate, buns, chips, dips, ice-cream, juice and cool drinks, candy, liquorice, flavoured milk ... Anyone who does that ought to be looking like a whippet at the end of six months.

But it's not taking it off that's the problem, it's keeping it off. It's a dangerous place out there in the concrete jungle, where you've got the likes of Nestles, Arnotts, Smiths, Coca Cola, Kelloggs, Cadburys, and their barking dogs the supermarkets, petrol stations and news agencies, walking around like roaring lions hell bent on seducing you into eating more of the junk food that made you fat in the first place.

Before the Kelloggification and Cocacolonization of this country, before it became fat, weak and depressed, the standard evening meal was meat and three veg. The CSIRO food technologists thought this sounded pretty right, dusted the concept down, dressed it up and then tried it out on a hundred muffin-topped female subjects. They liked it. They lost the weight they'd found and felt better, the hallmarks of a good diet.

So, if you're a South Australian, live in Toorak, drive a Volvo, work sitting down, wear a tweed skirt and a twin set, shop at Demasius and spend the summer holidaying at Chiton Rocks, this is the diet for you.

On the other hand, if you live in Angle Park, wear tracksuit bottoms and Ugg boots, drive a VH Valiant and shop at Arndale, I suggest if you want to lose weight, go the child's serve and leave the chips and gravy off your next plateful of cutlets and coleslaw.

Junk research

So what's it all about. Well for starters it's based on junk research, meaning its research that didn't need to be done again because it's been done to death a thousand times over. Either the scientific memory in this country is very short or academic information searching skills deficient. It's an over-indulgent exercise on the part of the blue-eyed cod, salmon and barramundi eating dieticians down on Kintore Avenue.

The world is awash with studies, already done that point clearly in the direction we're being led in this book. There is no doubt in my mind that the principles of the diet are sound, but that's not the point. This is re-invention of the wheel gone mad. The team at the CSIRO could have recommended people get the Zone Diet, or the walk-around-your-Hills-Hoist diet, or buy a Women's Weekly recipe book at their local checkout and left it at that. The plates of food presented in the Weekly look much like those in the CSIRO book - good food, well presented, not a biscuit, chip or block of chocolate in sight.

This is the CSIRO minnow selling a couple of million dollars worth of books, trying to compete with companies like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig (more about them in the next newsletter) who have yearly incomes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. These organisations, along with a host of reputable fat loss organisations have already done the research and the hard yards in getting satisfied customers back on the straight and narrow. This is research that didn't need to be done. The CSIRO could have just directed people to these organisations and left it at that.

You'll notice though that the book doesn't contain a suggested reading list of books they recommend. It doesn't contain a list of the organisations they recommend you go to for support while you're losing fat off your body. If they'd done that they would increased the usefulness of the advice and dramatically reduced the cost of providing it.

(So, if you click here you'll be taken through to the Diet Bookshelf at the Health and fitness Bookstore where you'll find my recommended list of  diet books and be able to make a purchase.)

And just so you don't thinking I'm talking out of the back of my neck, click here and take a look at the Hourglass Diet - now available in ebook format.

There must be more important original research to be done than rehashing this stuff, research that is helpful to people who want to eat wisely, have lots of energy and vitality and maintain an ideal weight;

• how to satisfy the inner hunger without fattening yourself up

• how to tame the Candida dragon

• how to lower insulin levels

• how to overcome your addiction to flour and sugar.

In this country we've got a discipline problem, we can't say 'No' to abundant, high density food; but you'll be holding your breath for a long time waiting for the definitive research study into over-coming that.

When people lay off junk food, fat just drips off them drips off them irregardless of how much they tinker with the percentage of protein. You'll see in the book that the people who went on the lower carbohydrate diet also lost weight, though not quite as much as the higher protein eaters. Just get rid of junk, walk around the Hills Hoist and you'll lose weight. QED.

A deficiency in this book is the lack of explanation as to why junk foods aren't in the diet - that would have been the real test of the diet, increase the protein but keep the junk in. In fact it's short on explanation generally. Plus it is always good to have a definition of junk food handy to guide readers.

So what sets this diet apart (p.12)? Well it's hard to work that one out from what the authors have to say. What could have been spelt out in BIG BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS was that this was a diet low on refined carbohydrates and sugar, and stripped of junk food.

The authors have backed away from saying that. Instead they say that it is 'not a very low carb diet.' Well that's not strictly true. They've stripped out most of the high density carbohydrates - flour and sugar - that people are addicted to and replaced them with low-energy-density vegetables and fruit.

All they can say is that 'What sets the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet apart is that it has been tested on hundreds of people since 1997 and is more than just a weight-loss strategy; it is a protein plus, low fat eating plan that can help you lose weight and keep it off.'

Well, hello!; there are a million diets in bookshops and on the internet that do the same thing. And it patronises all the diets that have been trialed on thousands of people over many years, not by scientists but by people who found a way to lose weight and wanted to share it with others.

With respect to the down-playing of the low carb issue, the Dietary Guidelines for Australian Adults recommends an intake of between 8 and 24 slices of bread a day (I know, I couldn't believe it when I saw it. A loaf of bread a day! No wonder everyone's getting fatter! It's a Government plot!) The success of the CSIRO diet is it's restriction of the two white powders - flour and sugar, and the encouragement of people to eat more animal flesh and vegetables.

If you get people to increase their protein intake they'll lose weight, due principally to the fact that it takes more energy to digest the protein than is in the protein. Plus it's the stimulation of the production of insulin by the two white powders that in turn stimulates the production of fat. That's Nutrition 101 science and it's been around for about 100 years.

If you stop people loading themselves up on bread and pasta, they'll lose weight. They'll feel better - less headaches, more vitality. If you get them to stop buying anything on the inside shelves of supermarkets they'll lose weight.

(If you really want to seriously lose weight, eat meat and tomatoes, and nothing else for a month. I've seen it done and the people didn't die. They looked like a million dollars.)

Tripe

A serious criticism is that it's a jaundiced account of the ordinary fare that ordinary people ought to be encouraged to eat. There's no mutton in this diet, just lamb, and it's obviously not the diet that's going to appeal to big booffy blokes who were brought up on brain patties and drool over a thought of plate of tripe, steak and kidney, or lambs fry and onions. This is middle class women's food; there's little in it for the working class. All the subjects were women. All but a couple of photos in the book are Sigrid and Olivia look-alikes.

On another serious note, the offal meats have just about been stripped out of our diets thanks to diets like this one and our health is suffering. Most women turn their nose up at a good lambs fry and gag at the thought of tripe and onions. Because of that, we're not getting the essential nutrients that offal provides. We're starving on full stomachs. You'll have to wait a long time before you'll get lambs fry back on your supermarket shelves. It's gone.

Eat like a sparrow

It will be exceptionally hard for a lot of people to exist on the breakfasts that are suggested; 200gms of yoghurt, a handful of breakfast biscuits ('Fibre Plus') and an apple. How can you do a decent days work on that. There's no bubble and squeak here, not a decent cooked breakfast in sight; that's gone, thanks to the fat police.

Another point is that according to Barry Sears in the Zone Diet there are good reasons to keep the ratios of fat, protein and carbohydrate pretty constant for all meals. In this one I can't see much fat in the breakfast, or protein for that matter either. Maybe I'm missing something, and again, I'll stand corrected.

It continues to amaze me the dieticians refuse to encourage people to eat the same sort of meal for breakfast as they eat for tea - instead the recommendation is the usual communion-wafer-sized slice of toast, a piece of fruit, a couple of tea spoons of yoghurt and some expensive, refined cereal-based biscuits. (If you want to know how the breakfast confectionary makers are taking you for a ride click here.) It's not much better than a bushman's breakfast! I find it hard to imagine why people are being encouraged to eat biscuits for breakfast. And where's the porridge? That's been thrown out too.

When it comes to breakfast there are three schools of thought:

• one that says you need vegetables and fruit before lunch

• another that this is the chance to get some high fibre cereal;

  and fruit into your body and

• another that says eat a decent cooked breakfast. 

Whatever you believe is right, I suspect that breakfast ought to contain at least 25% of daily energy needs.

Eat like a king for breakfast they used to say. This diet is eat like a sparrow for breakfast - and then sneak down for a muffin and flat white at 9.30!

The usual suspects are lined up for lunch, with sandwiches coming in as the predominant choice. In our culture bread is a convenience food. It would have been good to see more of the non-bread lunch alternatives - particularly last night's left-overs. It's only a lack of imagination and laziness that has us choose the sandwich over something more substantial. You wouldn't have a sandwich for tea so why have it for lunch?

The side show

The Glycemic Index had to be given a run. Give this diet a big tick because it is definitely low GI because de-emphasizing of bread, rice and pasta. Meat, fish and chicken have a GI of 0.

The GI will always be a side show while the low GI bar is set at 55. This diet encourages you to eat at a much, much lower GI that that. It's one of the secrets of its success. Want to know more about Glycemia?

The authors have come in for a ribbing about the sponsorship of the research by the meat industry. Interestingly though, the sponsorship by the dairy industry hasn't attracted the same sort of criticism, despite wide-spread knowledge (outside nutrition circles) about the undesirability of humans drinking bovine milk and the calcium from that source not being in the most readily absorbable form. We're currently in the grip of an epidemic of irritable bowels, stimulated in large part by over consumption of milk and wheat flour. This debate isn't pursued by the authors.

Cracking the fat code

Have you noticed that the less fat people are supposedly eating the fatter they're becoming. This is because they usually substitute fat with flour and sugar.

As I said earlier, I suspect there is not enough fat in the diet. Everything is 'low fat', even the milk which is already low in fat (around 5%) before they turn it into lower fat milk. The meat is all trimmed of fat, the chicken of skin. (Am I the only person who loves the skin on the chicken?)

People need fat in their diet or they become depressed and arthritic; another epidemic. I doubt that this diet contains the 26% of energy from fat as outlined in one of the tables. I may be wrong and I'll stand to be corrected, but I can't see much fat around.

Satisfying the inner hunger

Like most diets, this one doesn't talk about why people have become overweight. My slant on this is that you can't satisfy the inner hunger by eating. If you restrict people's access to the food that's satisfying the inner hunger and don't deal with and separate the inner hunger from the food, as likely as not, in a couple of months time all the fat will have come back on again.

It takes a monumental amount of discipline to keep starving yourself of the foods to which you have become addicted. A section on what to do about this would have been a useful addition to the book.

Any diet that doesn't also address this core issue relating to the satisfaction of the inner hunger sells it's customers short. It's easy to dash off a few recipes - tell people to stop eating junk. It's a much tougher assignment cranking up a personal development program that digs down deep into the subconscious and unlocks the potential people have to eat to nourish the cells of their body without fattening themselves up in the process.

Until you can find out why you're over eating, dredging back into the dim distant past for the original trigger(s), it's unlikely that you be able to maintain the discipline required to eat healthily. There will always be struggle, not flow. It would be a very tough assignment for someone to do this work on themselves without the help of a good counselor.

Books and programs addressing this issue are around but because scientists from different disciplines don't talk to each other, you'll have to go to the psychology section for that one. Find out what's causing you to eat to excess and fix that. Then the food will look after itself.

It stretches the imagination to call this a total well-being diet. To be called a 'Total Wellbeing Diet' without addressing the issue of personal development and life circumstances leaves a big void in the book. Let's face it, its a recipe book in which the concept of wellbeing is trivialized by reducing it to eating and exercising.

A section could also have been written exposing the junk food industry, particularly that section whose products line the inner shelves of super markets and who use play school presenters to seduce children into the high flour and sugar way of eating. However, when some of them sponsor the various nutrition professional associations and get a tick from the heart charities that's probably asking a bit too much.

The flick program

(As an aside, go to the website of your favourite food tick program. If it's food that comes in a cardboard box, plastic bag or a bottle, I'd give it the flick. Click here if you want to donate money.

The exercise prescription

The exercise section is glib. It's not scientific. The recipe for exercise is particularly under done. However, it's the exercise recipe that may well invalidate the science that's supposedly underpins the success of the weight-loss program.

Did everyone in the study do the same amount of exercise? If it was me and I was in a study to see how much weight I could lose I'd exercise like buggery. We could also expect that the fattest people would lose the most weight because the heavier you are, more energy you use up whenever you move, regardless of whether or not it is an exercise training session.

Find out more about the Exercise Prescription.

Selective evidence

The other piece of poor form is the list of references, - very selective, in that all of them have one thing in common, the name of the lead author of the book.

The thing about the science of dieting is that for every bit of research suggesting one way of eating is better than another, there are a dozen, if not hundreds saying you'd be better off doing something else. In the end you have to sift through all the stuff and do your own research on your own body. Lew Hoad said, never change a winning serve. Once you find an eating program that works for you, stick to it.

Fitness and Diet (FAD)

Have you ever noticed all the fad diets around? No-one ever owns up to producing a fad diet, but every one who writes one criticizes every other diet as being a fad diet.

There are those who say 'Diets don't work'. Of course they don't when you go off them. If you go on a diet - any diet - you'll lose weight. If you maintain a bit of discipline and don't eat too much junk, and in the spirit of the CSIRO diet restrict your calorie intake, lay off junk and eat more protein, you'll lose weight. If you exercise you might lose it a bit quicker. That's science folks; year 10 science!

Toorak delight

This book has been a delight to review. I loved thumbing through the pages and drooled over pictures of juienne sprigs of coriander, rocket (correction, arugula) chopped rosemary, (can't forget that), baby capers, chopped, flat-leafed (italian) parsley, bunches of baby bok choy (pak choi), goats cheese and watercress. This is real Aussie tucker at its best.

What's good about the book is the way the meals are dressed up and photographed, though the Women's Weekly produces something similar every month.  A mate of mine says he'd got the book and though the menu's are putting a dent in the housekeeping, they're easy to follow to the point where he's racking up huge numbers of brown points. He said some of them look like the meals dished up in flash restaurants and not on your kitchen table, plus you can fill yourself up without overdosing on bread, and spuds.

If you live in Toorak, Kensington or Beaumont, rush out and buy a copy, for yourself (if you're a woman) or your wife (if you're a bloke.) It will cost you $29.95 at the aerodrome and $18 at Big W. If you buy it from the Health and Fitness Bookstore, which I highly recommend you do, it will cost you $34.95 plus postage. You'll get thin and I'll get rich!

If you live in Angle Park, Kilburn or Wingfield join Weight Watchers where, through trial, error and observation on millions of people world-wide they worked this one out 30 years ago.