An urgent wake-up call about the hidden dangers of fad diets.
In this debut guide for physicians, a medical doctor argues that saturated fat is killing people and that health care workers aren’t doing enough to educate patients about its dangers.
Trendy diet plans, such as the ketogenic and Atkins diets, have promised to help people shed pounds while loading up their plates with steak, butter, and cheese. But there’s a problem, argues Allen, a family practitioner and a member of the American Board of Obesity Medicine: An overwhelming body of scientific evidence indicates that a diet high in saturated fat raises bad low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, cholesterol, and can lead to serious ailments, including Type 2 diabetes, dementia, heart disease, and gout. However, through a combination of clever marketing and faulty studies, Allen asserts, the food industry has “worked hard to distort the truth,” convincing people that foods such as eggs and coconut oil are unambiguously healthy. Popular diet gurus and news media willing to report the results of any scientific study don’t help, but doctors share a big part of the blame, he says. They can help by not only talking frankly to patients about their diet, but also modeling good behavior: “As healers, our disdain for saturated fat needs to be nearly as pervasive and persistent as our contempt for cigarette smoking,” Allen writes. Some readers won’t want to hear the author’s blunt message that everyone should limit their saturated fat intake to 6% of their daily calories. (He cites a 2017 American Heart Association study that lists the current average for Americans as nearly 12%.) A vegan himself, Allen cites a mountain of evidence that significantly cutting back on animal products and eating more fruits, vegetables, and grains is better for long-term health—and that evidence is indeed persuasive. He also clearly highlights flaws in research that purports to show the benefits of a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Vivid examples, such as a discussion of the heart attack that killed Emmy- and Golden Globe–winning actor James Gandolfini, effectively drive the author’s point home. Although this book is written for other doctors, its no-nonsense, conversational style will make it equally accessible to readers who aren’t medical professionals.
An urgent wake-up call about the hidden dangers of fad diets.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0336-3
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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