The Great American Detox Diet: 8 Weeks to Weight Loss and Well-Being [Hardcover] Review

I found "Supersize Me" to be one of the great documentaries (of sorts) in quite a while, not the least of which was the healthy dose of irony in that the girlfriend of star Morgan Spurlock, Alex Jamieson, was a vegan chef witnessing this diet he went on.

Well, the movie's a huge success, Morgan and to a lesser extent Alex are mild celebrities, and they both took the time to write books.Admittedly, this wreaks of commercialism, but remarkably both turned out good pieces, Spurlock's a companion to "Supersize Me", and Jamieson's revolving around the "Detox Diet" that she put Spurlock on after his month of McDonald's.

The book essentially is broken into three parts-- the first part is sort of introductory/background material-- Jamieson describes her journey from confessed junk food nut to vegan/health maven.It makes for an interesting read, but I felt the level of repetition (and endless reinfocement about processed sugar, etc.) that get to be kind of a drag.

The second part is the "detox diet"-- a week by week transition plan for abandoning the many processed and chemical additives that are throughout our food.

The third part is a series of healthy vegan recipes, some of which look quite interesting, and while I've used none of them, I've stolen a couple ideas for my own cooking.

My thoughts on this-- before I go further, I'm not a vegan, nor am I likely to become one anytime soon, but I derived a lot of value in this book, in particular from its advice in reading food labels and what's missing from them, and its advice in checking ALL food labels-- for example, we all know High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is a corn-based sugar syrup (and at least some of us know that the body doesn't seem to register it as consumed calories and so hunger isn't effected which is why many folks can down ten cans of soda and still eat a full meal-- but if you didn't know that, Jamieson points it out to you).But what I don't think I knew is how prevelent it is-- on advice from the book, I read labels of seemingly innocent product-- bread.In my local grocery store I read about two dozen bread variety labels, and most of them (including a number advertized as "whole grain" and "multigrain" and "healthy") contained HFCS.In fact, I STOPPED looking when I found one that didn't have HFCS.And that scares me.

She also spends a lot of time talking about the flour enriching process, oil processing, water chemical additives, and so on-- I found all of this quite valuable in its own way as well, and armed with this knowledge, I made some subtle changes in my purchasing habits.

Mind you, Jamieson also recommends against plastic, I don't suspect I'd ever purge my life of plastic, and against caffeine, another thing I don't particularly want to go without (while I can and have gone weeks without my morning coffee, I enjoy the taste and decaf never tastes right to me).But its certainly all worthwhile to read, the more knowledge you have, the better.

One thing to point out-- adhering to the changes wholesale she advocates would get rather expensive-- there's a reason HFCS is all over the place, its cheap.This is true of all sorts of things from enriched flours to hydronated oils.While I'm certainly not hurting for cash, I think it'd be a bit too much of an impact on me financially to move in this direction.One other thing is that Jamieson recommends a wholesale purge of your diet of negative substances while overlooking that a number of people love this kind of stuff.I'm not advocating any behavior, but I know personally that when I restructured my diet about a year and a half ago, I still had to make room for the occasional deep fried takeout order to keep myself sane.

The recipes like I said look very interesting-- I haven't tried anything (yet), but I may, and like any good recipe book, there's a lot of worth-stealing suggestions in here.

Its a good book, packed with information, and well worth the read.Recommended.

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