The Golden Gate Diet
Posted January 24, 2006 at 12:54 pm
So I got an email from Adam Brook; he’s written The Golden Gate Diet. You can read the first two chapters of his book online, which is nice.
Based on that, it appears that this is Dr. Brooks’ version of Volumetrics. Both diets focus on eating more foods that have a low energy density (less calories, more volume) and less foods that have a high energy density (more calories, less volume). The reason for this is that the former tend to satisfy us more so that we don’t feel hungry, which makes staying on the diet (read: lifetime plan) much easier.
In this scheme, fruits and veggies are better for you, cakes and cookies are not. And what both do is look at the issue of balance. Foods aren’t forbidden, but the goal is to eat less of the foods that don’t fill you up, but keep piling up the calories.
So, while Dr. Brook didn’t send me a free copy :), I do like the sound of the plan. And I really like that he spends as much time (based on the TOC) on eating for health as for weight loss.
If this kind of plan sounds like it would work for you, then I’d pick up The Golden Gate Diet. You might also want to pick up Volumetrics for the recipes (it’s annoyingly mostly recipes, so I wound up picking up her older book recently for my library).
But now, a major complaint
I’m sure that Dr. Brook is going to hear an earful from the low-carb evangelists like Jimmy Moore. And IMO, for good reason. In chapter 2, Dr. Brook is very critical of diets like Atkins and South Beach, saying:
Why are there so many diet books out there that not only don’t work in the long run but are positively unhealthy? Why is there so much pseudo-scientific nonsense and so little truth? I am not entirely sure, but it may having something to do with the modern publishing-marketing complex. If a diet book is based on sound medical principles, it is likely to be branded as not having anything “new” and is unlikely to be published. However, if a diet book goes against sound medical principles, it can be marketed as the latest fad. This is a sad state of affairs, since people are tricked into following, for example, the Atkins diet, which is about as bad a diet as there is.
Ahh, this is bad, and the modern publishing-marketing gimmick of naming diets after places is good.
I don’t espouse any particular diet, as I think ALL OF THEM ARE FLAWED. Including Dr. Brooks’ diet. But what really burns me is when they take pot shots at each other.
For example, I think it is cheap (and rhetorical) to blame Clinton’s bypass surgery on the South Beach diet (see chapter 2, page 10). First of all, yes, South Beach wants folks to limit carbs. But that doesn’t mean that they expect people to fill up on meats full of saturated fats. Bill Clinton did that because that’s what he ate before he began dieting. Who needs Morgan Spurlock when you could look at Clinton and see where a lifetime of crappy eating got you?
But here’s the other thing that pisses me off. I don’t disagree with the low-carb critics that a healthy diet includes fruits, veggies, and grains. But guess what? So do the low-carbers! What I think that gets very little press is that a major point of the different composition diets is their ability to aid in diet compliance.
I talked a bit about this re Health magazine’s diet face-off. Their research showed one thing: if you put people on diets that aren’t compatible with their preferences, they cheat. And cheat big time.
But the thing I think is really critical is the extent to which the composition of the diet reduces cravings. Cravings are a dieter’s worst nightmare. I happen to think that lower-carb diets reduce physiological cravings, since I believe there is something re carb metabolism that causes cravings. I don’t know whether it is related to blood sugar, blood insulin levels, beta-endorphins, serotonin, or dopamine.
The thing is no one knows. Because our medical establishment is too busy bickering about how low-carb is so unhealthy that they won’t look at other possibilities. And in the meantime, you have people like Anne and me and the doctor on Oprah recently who were going great guns on our diets until we slipped. And those slips turned into weeks or months of eating that had us gaining weight back. Some folks wind up slip sliding until they gain it all back and then more.
THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE GOING ON!
I wish we’d stop treating folks like all we have to do is wrap up “eat less, exercise more” in the right pretty package and we’ll buy it. Crap, none of us want (on a conscious level) to be really overweight. But we’ve got our psychological issues, cultural mixed messages, and damn it, we’ve got physiology working against us, mostly because we just don’t have a good understanding about what really causes people to eat stuff that isn’t conducive to health.
Sorry, Dr. Brook, I’m unloading on a lot more folks than just you. Your book, as written, is great for the person who is a few pounds overweight and just doesn’t know what eating healthy means.
But there are a lot of us who do know what it is and we just don’t do it.
You may think it’s just because we haven’t hit on the right plan, or because we’re psychologically weak or lazy, and that’s your right. But I happen to think it’s a lot more than that, and I wish more people would look seriously at physiological causes of overeating.
I’m not sure that we need the level of carb reduction that Atkins, Protein Power, and South Beach promote. And I eat more carbs than they recommend for someone my size (I call what I do SuperFoods Rx meets Volumetrics meets Rachael Ray). But I do think they are on to something about how some folks’ bodies handle the carbs.
Like I said the other day, I sure hope we understand it in my lifetime!
January 24th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
We may NEVER understand in this lifetime or the next! LOL!
January 25th, 2006 at 7:47 am
Amen sister! *lol* I have cobbled together a plan that is my own - the principles of Body for Life with Rachel Ray’s great sense of seasoning. And if you are in this for the long haul, that’s what you have to do. You can’t live your whole life trying to be a square peg in the round hole. I’m getting to the point where I just don’t want to read any more of these books. I know how to eat healthy - the trick now is dealing with all the reasons why I choose not to.
January 28th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
Hi Beth,
Thanks for your kind words. I do want to emphasize that the book discusses not only how to lose weight, but also how to eat to avoid heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.
What distinguishes THE GOLDEN GATE DIET from the fad diets is that it is based on my clinical experiences successfully treating patients with weight disorders as well as on the scientific literature. And make no mistake, the scientific literature is clear. Low-carb diets are extremely dangerous. For example, Drs. Anderson and Jenkins, from the University of Kentucky and the University of Toronto, have calculated that on average the Atkins diet will increase your cholesterol by 51 points, which leads to a greater than 100% increase in your risk of heart disease. This article, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American College of Nutrition, is one among many articles published in peer-reviewed medical journals that make the dangers of low-carb diets clear.
Which brings me to another point. THE GOLDEN GATE DIET is based on scientific evidence. Physicians have conducted randomized, controlled clinical trials. The evidence from these trials is referenced extensively in the book. As a physician and scientist, I do not believe in hearsay, rumor, and pet theories: I look at what the evidence is. The great bulk of the fad diets do not look at the evidence and the data but simply invent out of thin air. People who want to lose weight and eat healthily should follow a diet based on the facts.
Moreover, I feel it is my responsibility as a physician and surgeon to warn my patients with heart disease about the dangers of low-carb diets. I have warned them for years about the dangers smoking has for the heart, because that is what the scientific evidence shown, and in the same way, I warn my hearrt patients about the dangers of low-carb diets, because that is what the scientific evidence has shown.
Warm regards,
Adam Brook, M.D., Ph.D.
Fellow, Cardiac Surgery
Yale University School of Medicine
January 30th, 2006 at 9:08 am
Dr. Brook,
Thanks so much for the reply. I’m not in a position to debate you, so I won’t try. But I will say that it is clear that not all medical professionals agree with you as the recent conference on carb restriction suggests. Maybe I’ll write an email to Discovery Health and suggest they put you and one of the Dr. Eades on to debate the point on their Discovery CME programs.
As I mentioned, I don’t eat a low-carb diet. But having been on them before, I am *very* sympathetic to their appeal for others. Whether it’s the ketones, the stable blood sugar, or what, complying with this diet was easy for me. My problem, of course, was that when I tried this (many years ago), it wasn’t a diet I was prepared to stay on for life.
Finally, I think the low-carb evangelists would love to have more randomized, controlled clinical trials. But hasn’t it been difficult for these to be funded because of the inherent belief in the medical community that low-carb diets are bad?
Anyways, I liked your book and your plan. In a perfect world though, you wouldn’t be so quick to condemn low-carb as a fad diet and begin to look at what I think are critical questions of carbs, weight, diet compliance, and health.
Beth
January 30th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
Hi Beth,
My book is really not mostly about what is wrong with low carb diets. The later chapters in the book (I can’t post the whole book online, can I?) tell specifically which foods cause heart disease and which foods cause cancer, and which food prevent heart disease and which foods prevent cancer. That said, there have been 20 randomized, controlled clinical trials of low carb diets. 4 have found greater weight loss with low glycemic index diets, 2 have found greater weight loss with high glycemic index diets, and the remaining 14 studies found no difference whatsoever. And as someone who is treating patients with coronary artery disease every day, I can tell you there is no question that low carb diets dramatically cause heart disease, much as there is no question that smoking dramatically causes heart disease. An excellent summary of this research was published in the November 2002 issue of Obesity Reviews by Dr. Raben of the Department of Human Nutrition in Denmark.
Later chapters in the book discuss the psychology of overeating. Psychological issues associated with overeating often can be treated successfully. I am a surgeon not a psychologist, and obviously I do not do behavioral therapy, etc. myself, but I can tell you, having seen the results in patients I have referred, that a combination of strategies often does work. This does not always work, but often it does.
In any event, I would send you a copy but I have very few copies myself. Most of the nurses in the Cardiac Surgical ICU at Yale have asked me for a copy, and I can’t even give each of them a copy, and these are people I work with every day. If you buy a copy on amazon and read the whole book, I think you will find it is worth every penny.
Warm regards,
Adam
January 30th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
Adam,
Thanks, I was really just joking about the free copy! And I didn’t mean to imply your book was about what is wrong with low-carb diets…I think I said I liked your diet plan and the focus on health. But I did have an issue with the way you dealt with low-carb diets in your chapter 2.
We’ll probably have to agree to disagree. Two things: I’m not really making the point that low-carb diets are *better* than low or high GI diets. I am making the case that it seems that many people find it difficult or impossible to comply with diets that are higher carb. And I think there is something to this that needs to be better understood.
Scondly, I have to disagree with assertion that there is “no question” that low carb diets cause heart disease. There may be no question for you, but there are people who are studying low-carb diets, and they don’t all seem to be selling diet books.
There’s also the Center for Science in the Public Interest. They wrote in their newsletter that the South Beach diet was a “[healthy] version of [the] Atkins diet that’s backed by solid evidence on fats and heart disease.” You wrote in your chapter 2 (now offline) that in your opinion, “Dr. Agatston appears to invent facts whenever it suits him.”
Pardon me for not knowing whether to trust you or the CSPI!
Now, you may well have legitimate points against these studies or the CSPI. I only raise it to suggest that maybe there’s still a question about whether or not low-carb diets are useful tools for weight management.
I don’t think it’s really worth your time to try and convince a lowly blogger. But I must admit to wishing that you’d look a little beyond what you think you see in low-carbing. It’s not only about inhaling saturated fats and saying goodbye to vegetables.
Beth
PS. Am I to blame/take credit for your pulling chapter 2 off the site? Yikes! BTW, you may want to pull it off the server. It’s easy enough to download it just by tweaking chapter 1’s URL.
February 4th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Dear Beth,
We continue to experiment with the site- chapter 2 will go back soon. It’s a tricky thing whether to put it on or not- the book is as much about eating healthy as losing weight.
As regards the Center for Science in the Public Interest- these people are well-intentioned (unlike the South Beach marketing mafia who in my opinion care mostly about your money). This does not mean that everything anyone at CSPI ever said is correct. Yes, South Beach is less dangerous than Atkins, but, in my opinion, South Beach is still very dangerous. In my opinion, an imperfect analogy would be Atkins is like smoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day, and South Beach is like smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day.
Still waiting for you to buy the book so you can tell everyone the interesting things that are in the later chapters.
Will be on radio and TV just a little bit in the next couple weeks, it’s a start…
Adam