The October issue of Health magazine has a special report titled “Our Real Life Diet Face Off” (not online yet). I hope to have more on this soon. But for now, I just have to vent about one of the diets in the face off, David Katz’s The Way to Eat.

I don’t really begrudge Katz his efforts to generate revenue from his work. But this one is a bit annoying in that once you sign up for your “free profile” you can no longer get to any of the (limited) freebie stuff until you pay (or blow away your browser cookie :).

And what about your “free profile”? Well, here’s what I got for entering my height and weight (besides a lot of links to sign up for the pay service): a healthy weight range, my current BMI, an ideal BMI range, and an ideal number of daily calories (click on the thumbnail for a larger version).

Big effing deal.

You can get this kind of stuff without the sales pitch from the CDC or the NIH.

Interestingly, it turns out that Katz was the nutritionist for VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club. Here’s more about his diet there. He’s also a frequent guest in Oprah-land.

Now, I certainly can’t disagree with a diet that has this as its focus:

The best way to pursue lasting weight control is to pursue health, and then let weight take care of itself.

And I’m certainly sympathetic to the premise in the diet face-off, which is it made sense to add a “lifestyle” approach along with the others (Weight Watchers, Atkins, and Ornish were the other three).

Finally, it’s not even like $3/week is so outrageous. But I’m disappointed that someone from such a hefty academic background got so sucked into the commerce world that he hides most of his approach behind a for-fee wall.

Now normally I’d be inclined to pick up the book to see if there’s anything new here. But based on this review at Amazon:

This nutrition guide and overview is fine if this is your first exposure to nutrition advice written by a medical expert for lay people. It is written in an accessible prose that makes complex nutritional advice easy to understand. It also offers tips on behavioral modification for those individuals who are struggling to lose weight.

For those who have been reading this kind of stuff for years, however, I would like to point out that Katz recommends the American nutrition and medical communities’ orthodoxy on low - fat, low protein, high-carb diets that is such a source of controversy in the medical community. We are currently at a nexis of research that may very well debunk much of what mainstream medicine has taught for years about nutrition.

So, I would only recommend this book for those who are just beginning their nutritional explorations. If you have travelled this low protein, low fat road before, and it has not worked for you, you might want to look at the alternative nutritional plans that are making their way into popular culture, like South Beach or Sugar Busters or the Zone. They offer a real alternative to Katz’s, Ornish’s and others’ low-fat, low protein diets.

I think I’ll take a pass.