Okay…onto your regularly scheduled post.
I just want to say, before you get to this review, that no one asked me to review this book. I didn’t receive a free copy, I’m not getting paid, and I don’t receive any benefit from sharing it.* It’s just that damn good that I couldn’t not share it with you. And I hope you read it and it changes your life, at least a little bit.
You know how sometimes you read a book and from the first line you’re so hooked that you can’t put it down, can’t stop thinking about it when you do put it down, and want everyone else to pick it up when you’re done with it?
Yeah. That’s how I felt about John Durant’s The Paleo Manifesto last year, and that’s how I feel about Denise Minger’s Death By Food Pyramid now.
Here’s the thing: it’s pretty clear from my somewhat “unconventional” feelings about nutrition that some of what Denise writes in Death by Food Pyramid wasn’t going to be a surprise.
[i.e. The government’s been lying to us—and lying to itself—about nutrition for (at least) the last 50 years, and politics, ethics, and science do not always align to create health.]
But this book needed to be written. And it needs to be read.
I’m going to be the first to admit that I’ve relied on secondhand sources, blog posts, experts, and others to start forming my opinions about nutrition and health. Most of us have—because we don’t have the access, time, knowledge, etc. to read the medical journals, parse the language, understand the logical fallacies, and let go of our own biases. For most of us laypeople, that’s just how it’s going to work.
In Death By Food Pyramid, however, Denise Minger lays bare the truth behind what we’ve been fed (literally and figuratively) about the science of nutrition. She gives you a primer for reading scientific journals and basically takes away all of our excuses for a) not being an informed consumer (of food AND information) and b) relying on others—including people not qualified to legislate about nutrition—to form our opinions.
And let me just say here that this is not, fundamentally, a “pro-Paleo” book. It’s not a “pro-vegan” or pro-diet-of-any-kind book either. Instead, it examines the types of nutrients that the healthiest hunter-gatherer societies ate (including high-carb, low-carb, grain-free, and grain-fed)—and reveals that…there is no one super-food or diet that worked for everyone. MOREOVER, some of those hunter-gatherer societies actually had to hack their health because their diets weren’t giving them enough of what they needed for optimal health and fertility.** And that’s why I love the heck out of it.
In short, Death By Food Pyramid can be broken down into three parts:
- How the food pyramid happened
- How to un-bias yourself and see past the pseudoscience we’ve been eating “for our health”
- How we can choose to take control of our individual diets and health (and make informed decisions about them)
Now here’s the thing—I understand that most of us, when we decide to make changes to our health and nutrition, look for someone else to hand us a blueprint, a meal plan, a pyramid, a list of do’s and don’t’s—something to give us the foundation from which to start building.
And that’s okay. We can’t build without a foundation–and you can’t tweak and individualize without knowing where to start. The trouble begins when we don’t ask the deeper “why” underneath the foundation and then trust that foundation to hold us up indefinitely.
Part of my own journey to health and a better mindset and understanding of nutrition has been to go through a period of relying on others to define my nutritional outlook on the world, where using the word “Paleo” was central to my understanding of diet. “Paleo” wasn’t a pyramid, but it might have well as been–for example, in the early days of transitioning out of veganism, I was one of the people driving the Google trend, searching for whether or not, for example, chia seeds were Paleo. I expected Whole30/21DSD/autoimmune/low carb, etc. etc. to clear up my acne, make my thyroid work properly, and give me my period back. I placed all of my pastured, organic, cage-free eggs in one basket, and, wonder of wonders, it didn’t work.
These days, I use the moniker “Paleo” to better describe the community of people who share my beliefs about whole, non-genetically modified foods, eating local, ethical farming practices, nutrient density, etc., than to describe the way I eat. Yes, my food is “Paleo” at it’s core—but I’ve incorporated things I’ve learned from the Weston A. Price foundation, the Perfect Health Diet, ketogenic diets, nutrigenomics, and more to develop the “Kaila” diet—one that is sustainable, tastes great, and is helping me heal my body.
I love being a part of the Paleo community—which includes locavores; sustainable farmers; people who follow the Whole30, and people who don’t; people who eat Primal; people who drink butter in their coffee; people who eat raw dairy, fermented foods, and organ meats; low-carb/high fat devotees; sweet potato lovers; perfect health dieters; people who #JERF; Crossfitters, Ironman Athletes, yogis, and everyone in between; people who are losing weight and people who are gaining weight; people healing autoimmune disease and worse; people who just like experimenting with spaghetti squash and zucchini spiralizers…
But I recognize that, ultimately, I have to make informed decisions about the way I eat. I have to understand the consequences of going low carb while trying to fix my thyroid. I have to live with the repercussions of eating vegan with MTHFR. I have to understand why I choose to eat nuts but not legumes, or neither, or both, and not just because I read about it in a blog post.
No single “Diet ™” will save us from ourselves –@missskinnygenes
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I also have to recognize that no one Diet(tm) is going to “save” me from myself. The way I eat while I’m healing my gut, working on my methylation, or fixing my thyroid/female hormones may not be the way I have to eat forever to maintain health. (And if that’s the case, I’m looking forward to butter!) So I’ll still call it Paleo, but there’s so much more to it than that. And to quote Denise:
“…we ought not assume diets that help reverse chronic conditions would also be necessary to help prevent them in the first place…our goal should be to regain the ability to handle a broad spectrum of healthful foods, not lock ourselves into a restrictive program for life. For that reason, it’s important not to immediately pledge eternal allegiance to a diet that helped pry you out of a medical jam.”
So, all of that to say…Death By Food Pyramid is a must-read. It made tangible many of the thoughts I’ve had of late about how I approach my nutrition—because labels, rules, and restriction are the undoing of recovery.
I’ll leave you with one last thought from Denise before you go off on your merry ways:
“The answer seems clear enough: we’ve set ourselves up to be a nation of disordered eaters, struggling against biology, when what really needs to change is the quality of our food.”
If you get the chance, check out Denise’s blog RawFoodSOS and read her post “I Made a Book.” You won’t regret it.
Stay hungry,
* (Unless you want to buy a copy through my Amazon link to help fund the Finding our Hunger podcast…in that case, I would REALLY appreciate it. Even if you click on the link and buy something else, it still goes to help the podcast.)
**Example: the Indians in the Arctic Circle didn’t have enough carbohydrate in their diets for optimal thyroid function/fertility, so they had to eat the thyroid of moose to conceive.
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