- Escape The Diet Trap - Dr John Briffa
After years of being told on various weight loss threads that I need to read this "low-carb" Bible and having come back from the summer holidays with an additional 3 kgs around my midriff I thought "Why not?".
The author says we don't need complex carbohydrates (pasta, rice, potatoes, bread etc) and should not be eating them at all. He allows simple carbohydrates (sugar) only as fruit and even then in small quantities. He makes a seemingly scientific case for all this, quoting studies and giving references.
However, there is abundant selection bias in these pages: For example, to "prove" that calorie-counting diets don't result in weight loss, he quotes poor results of diets that last for over a year and which restrict calorie intake to about 1,000 kcal under the calories needed to keep weight stable. That would be like me trying to starve myself eating only about 600 kCal a day for a year - it is unrealistic and doesn't take a genius to understand that these poor souls must have given up soon into the diet.
He also assumes that calorie-control diets cause terrible stress (because he says you keep checking + adding up calories all through the day) and affects the body negatively in all sorts of ways, but that is not necessarily true. You have a meal plan and you stick to it. There is no need to keep calculating all through the day.
Although I agree with him re having evolved to eat certain foods and not others, I found his insistence that what was good for our ancestors a million years ago must be great now rather spurious. Life expectancy during the Paleolithic Age was about 30 for women. We don't know if our changed diet has contributed to women's life expectancy increasing to 82. Similarly, it is no consolation at all that those human ancestors lived well and good without any dairy products - they never had to live to 80.
Also, some of it just didn't make sense: For example, re obesity, he considers the relationship between weight and health not with the risk of individual conditions, but with overall risk of death. Huh? So we are healthy as long as we are not dead? 
So if someone is so heavy that she can't move and suffers a variety of conditions and is in constant pain because of her obesity that's fine because she is alive? Very strange logic.
There is also a bit of intellectual dishonesty going on: He dismisses studies that show weight loss with calorie-control methods because they don't go on for long periods of time (which is normal imho) but then uses some other studies with time periods of 7-9 days to "prove" a point.
And he has a strangely narrow view of exercising - seems to think walking is brilliant but running has no additional benefits.
Still, I enjoyed this book (I sound like a masochist 
) and learned from it about the different effects of food on the body. Oh and I was inspired to eat less carbs and so lost the 3 kgs extra that I'd been lugging around.