Yay, I get to use this icon AGAIN
Now, before I begin, I've read maybe four or five chapters of it. It was so bad, I just couldn't put myself through any more of it. Here are some of my observations:
1) The book does, in fact, bring up salient points against various fad diets.... but, the "diet habits" they're pitching are uber-organic vegan. Which is a fad diet itself IMO.
2) Yes, pesticides and chemicals and antibiotics in our food supplies aren't good for us. Surprisingly enough (if you read the doom-saying book), Americans generally have quite long expected life spans, instead of dying in their 40s for over-consumption of the eeeeeeeeevil chemicals. Excuse me while I avoid stressing myself out over this. /sarcasm
3) The book seriously denigrates the Atkins (aka, high-protein) diet. Now, as the book presents it, this "Atkins diet" actually would be bad news (eat as many cheeseburgers as you want!). However, my own dad spent YEARS on his no-carb diet, and most of his family (his parents and brothers, I mean, not the later generation yet) has implemented similar diet regimes. You'd never know from reading the book that low-carb diets stress drinking lots of H20, eating TONS of leafy greens, and eating low-carb fruits such as cantaloupe and strawberries. He would also eat nice healthy things such as walnuts, and to get the fiber you need (in addition to the aforementioned gobs of salad and broccoli!) there are low-carb crackers that are actually like 90% fiber that he would eat as well. Now, it's perfectly valid to say that a low-carb diet isn't for everyone, since not everyone's metabolism works the same way. It just happens to be that his family does well on a low-carb diet. And now that he's been on that diet for years and lost a lot of weight (think in the 90-lb range) he's relaxed and added a BIT more carbs to his diet. The book doesn't acknowledge this PROPER execution of a low-carb diet at all, and just mocks those who end up eating 1100 calories for every meal and end up sick from lack of nutrients and fiber.
4) "Organic" != healthy every time. Sure, if you know what you're getting, organic produce may well be healthier than "pesticide-laden" produce. But remember, "Mother Nature" is really out to kill you, and as the book points out, pesticides can linger in the environment for years, so your so-called "organic" produce probably has pesticide residues right inside of it too! (Oh, and poison ivy is organic. Also poisonous frogs, and snake and spider venom. The deadly nightshade family of plants is organic. Tomatoes are actually a part of that group; don't eat the greens, just the fruit, because the plant itself is POISONOUS. Also completely organic.)
5) Organic = expensive. If I had a choice between two equivalent products, one organic and one produced with pesticides, AND THEY WERE THE SAME PRICE or very, very nearly the same, I would buy the organic one. Is this what you see in stores? No. The organic produce is neatly shelved all by itself, so you don't look at the organic bell peppers and the pesticide-sprayed bell peppers and see that the organic ones cost $5 a pound more (despite not having the overhead costs of pesticide)! You know what? I don't have an unlimited budget, so I'm going to go with the cheaper product that umpty-ump hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people buy all the time without keeling over, dropping dead, and/or having to be hospitalized just for eating it. Thanks.
IN CONCLUSION
I'm not exactly completely ignorant when it comes to nutrition and healthy eating; it's not like my parents and my in-laws and I aren't concerned with it. (In fact, my husband has horror stories from when he was a kid and his mother tried to feed them "health food" that was just plain nasty.) So I've absorbed a lot of time-tested advice along with whatever health food news I do happen to hear. The basic things that will aid healthy eating in our culture are as follows:
1) Portion control
2) Go light on refined sugars and artificial sweeteners
3) Eat more fruits and veggies, and less animal protein
4) Practice MODERATION
A lot of the "dangers" in various chemical substances are discovered in laboratory tests where mice or rats are force-fed or injected with HUNDREDS OF TIMES the amount of whatever trace chemicals a human would eat. I suspect that these "health-food nuts" are perfectly willing to decry the sufferings of animals bred and kept for the meat industry while touting test results derived from the sufferings of OTHER animals (while simultaneously protesting lab testing on animals). You can't have it both ways, folks. You wouldn't have all those shiny test results proving how bad these chemicals are without those mice and rats having nasty things done to them and suffering horrible fates!
The simple fact of the matter is that yes, the healthiest food available is likely to be that which you've produced yourself, or your friends have grown in their own back yard. However, you can't produce all your food that way even if you do have a yard (and still keep the job that pays for that yard), and a LOT of people don't own land at all, or own the tiny 3 feet of grass surrounding their monster house. I ALSO know from experience that growing your own food is time- and effort-consuming, and will very quickly teach you to hate the insects that devour your carefully cultivated plants, in which case you spend MORE time and effort trying to thwart them. But if you DON'T grow your own food, watch out for that nasty salmonella on the spinach and tomatoes! At least when it's on your poultry (or trichinosis, a truly terrifyingly scary parasite in pork) you can COOK it and kill it! No such luck with fresh fruits and veggies! Have fun at the hospital. :P
In summary, don't bother reading it; it's pitched toward people too stupid or lazy to do their own nutrition research, and is really just a propaganda ploy for vegans.
Now, the Eat This, Not That book is actually HELPFUL, especially if you eat out a lot! (Which Jonathan and I don't, actually, but I always knew that HALF a TGIF's hamburger is quite enough for one meal! LOL)