Douglas J. Lisle

Talks about the biology behind why processed foods/junk food/meat and dairy can be so addictive, food addictions.

The solution is the either give a SOS vegan diet a few weeks for your taste buds to adjust or water fast a few days so your taste buds are more sensitive to real flavors in food.

Did a 10 day water fast on my own and it really does reset your taste buds. Had some Doritos which I used to love, and it tasted like a lot of salt, artificial flavors and was too dry, not as good as I remembered it.

This is a good book to reread if you want to stick/following a whole foods plant based diet.… (plus d'informations)

Our modern world makes it all too easy to get foods rich in sugar and fat that would have been rare treats for our ancestors back in pre-agricultural days. Our physiological and emotional responses are tuned to that pre-agricultural world and are not well adapted to the hyper-abundance of the modern world. Food now is not just simply abundant but somehow designed to be addictive in order to maximize the profits of the suppliers. To live a healthy life in this unnatural world requires understanding and discipline.

A vegan diet is the healthiest option. Meaning natural foods, unrefined and unprocessed. A gradual approach is not so effective. In fact what works the best is a supervised water-only fast to break oneself of the cycle of addiction to rich foods. Coming out of such a fast, natural foods will taste wonderful and from there it should be much simpler matter of maintaining a healthy pattern rather than pushing up a huge hill of resistance to get on that path.

It's a difficult puzzle. The idea that a healthy diet is the diet that is natural to us, that we evolved to, that seems reasonable, but clearly people have used that logic to argue for radically different diets, e.g. the paleo diet which I think is heavily meat oriented. This book is also very much diet oriented in contrast e.g. with Younger Next Year which uses some similar logic but is very exercise oriented. Younger Next Year views the famine mode of operation of the human physiology as something to avoid whereas The Pleasure Trap sees it as a healing mode.

It really does seem like the usual modern style is one rather tightly knotted into addictive cycles, so this book is useful in pointing that out. The easy path is not generally the path that leads to the best results. Of course any random difficult path is not likely to succeed either. This books sketches out a plausible path but doesn't particular argue its correctness versus other plausible alternatives. It mainly argues against the easy path. So it has some genuine value but it is more like a preliminary foray.

We really need to get some clarity on what is healthy living but somehow everybody is still shouting contradictory messages and the debates continue over the centuries and millennia. Why has the scientific method not managed to cut through this confusion? That's the book I'd like to see! Good Calories, Bad Calories gets going in that direction but I suspect the truth is a lot deeper yet.

Even a vegan diet might be a bit tricky for many folks! I suspect that people just come in different types. Probably most folks can do well on a vegan diet but not all on the same vegan diet. How much fat, how much fiber, etc. will surely vary.

I was a bit annoyed because in the water fasting chapter this book seem to veer a bit too close to the message "come to our spa, that is the only way to health". Yeah, just look at the amount of power and profit tied up in diet. It really is like religion. Not so remarkable after all that the scientific method is not quite uncorruptable enough to survive unscathed in such a strenuous terrain!… (plus d'informations)