Feel-Good Food by Susie Miller & Karen Knowler (Review by Dr David Ryde, Sep 00
Susie Miller and Karen Knowler. The Women's Press, 250pp, pbk, £8-99.
Evidence strongly suggests that appropriate food for humans is largely plant-based and raw. Of the 5000 mammalian species only humans cook their food and drink milk after weaning - milk from another species at that! Closely related species eat a similar diet and humans are close to the anthropoid apes which live on a diet of raw, almost exclusively plant foods.
Feel-Good Food confirms my long-held views and clinical experiences. Doctors traditionally prescribe relevant drugs for diseases, but a few of us consider lifestyle, and especially diet, to be a common factor in disease causation and we witness dramatic pathological reversals of disease through appropriate lifestyle changes. It is better to avoid disease, however effective the therapy. There is now a growing band of American physicians who confirm, in greater depth, my own observations of disease reversal in cases of angina, hypertension, obesity, diabetes and other illnesses.
Feel-Good Food, subtitled A Guide to Intuitive Eating, recommends a diet of fresh, organic vegan food - a long way from nutrient-deprived processed foods and intensive, chemical-based farming. Its seven chapters deal with what people should eat, and the anatomy and physiology of digestion, assimilation and elimination. The authors (respectively the founder and current coordinator of The Fresh Network) describe in depth how to listen to 'body signals', wherein lies the inner wisdom of how to live and eat and the road to a more purposeful life. In doing so they cover food combining, cooking, fluid balance, food addictions and preferences, emotional eating and self-esteem, detoxification, eating at home and away from home, diet in pregnancy, infancy and youth, and shopping. The book also includes recommended reading, useful contacts, references and an index. Those who believe that vegans live on little more than lettuce leaves would do well to read this comprehensive but concise book, especially the long final chapter.
Dr David Ryde, September 2000
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Author: Dr David Ryde
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Story last updated by on 2008-11-18 15:53:46.
