Diet Novelties .com

Diet for a New America by John Robbins  „…Before lecturing citizens on what to eat, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop ought to avoid choking them. His 712-page report on nutrition and disease is a hard-to-swallow bulk of informational lard, with a shelf date long expired.It’s old knowledge that Koop provides: American diets are too fatty, salty and sugary and people are dying to eat what prematurely kills them. He’s among the last to endorse the established way: choose “vegetables, fruits, whole-grain foods, fish, poultry, lean meats and low-fat dairy products.” And his hype that the report is “a landmark in public health” is the intellectual equivalent of a bag of Cheetos washed down with Kool-Aid.

Koop is an assembler of information from several thousand past studies and reports. No supermarket has sufficient shelving for all the documentation published in the past 25 years on diet and disease. Compared with the customary federal temerity in confronting or regulating the meat, poultry, dairy and junk-food industries, Koop may believe he’s on the cutting edge of boldness by giving the nation what amounts to an anthology of old nutrition studies. Little critical thinking or fresh analysis is in the report.

By merciful coincidence, Koop’s counsel arrives at the moment that another nutritional authority-legit-is on the scene. John Robbins, a Ben Lomond, Calif., psychotherapist, fulfills in “Diet for a New America” the promise he makes in the book’s preface: to “show you how your food choices can be of tremendous benefit, not only to your own life, but to the less fortunate of the world as well. No self-deprivation is called for, but simply the understanding that the healthiest, tastiest and most nourishing way to eat is also the most economical, most compassionate, and least polluting. . . . You benefit, the rest of humankind benefits, the animals benefit, and so do the forests and rivers and the soil and the air and the oceans.”

Leaving aside the question of why aren’t Koop and his food feds writing with that kind of breadth and depth, Robbins has unique credibility. He is the son or Irv Robbins, the founding co-partner of Baskin-Robbins, now the world’s largest ice-cream company. Born with a silver ice-cream spoon in his mouth-the family’s swimming pool was shaped like an ice-cream cone-Robbins thought it normal to gorge a quart of ice cream at one sitting. He worked in the stores as a teen-ager and, being groomed, did junior management work. Having gone to Berkeley in the 1960s, plus a summer of civil-rights work in the South in 1965, Robbins spent his twenties figuring out that life was more than scooping ice-cream profits.

When offered the family business by his father, Robbins declined. He went on to do graduate work in nutrition and health. Now in his early forties and with all financial ties to his family’s ice-cream fortune severed, Robbins has written a book that is the pioneering match of Aldo Leopold’s “Sand County Almanac,” John Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice,” and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”

Like those volumes, “Diet for a New America” is rich with facts that are astounding but wouldn’t be if the federal guardians of public health were on the job:

Water needed to produce a pound of wheat: 25 gallons.

Water needed to produce a pound of meat: 2,500 gallons.

Training in nutrition during four years of medical school by the average U.S. doctor: 2 1/2 hours.

The dairy industry tells us: whole milk is 3 1/2 percent fat.

The dairy industry doesn’t tell us: the 3 1/2 percent figure is based on weight, and most of the weight in milk is water. The amount of calories as fat in whole milk is 50 percent.

The feeding of antibiotics to livestock is banned by the European Economic Community. The feeding of antibiotics to U.S. livestock is fully supported by American meat and drug companies.

Cost of hamburger meat if water used by the meat industry was not subsidized by tax money: $35 a pound.

200 million pounds of meat are imported annually to the United States from Central America while the average Central American eats less meat in a year than the American housecat.

1,000 species become extinct annually due to destroyed rain forests, much of it cleared to graze cattle killed for U.S. meat-eaters.

Robbins’ philosophy is Albert Schweitzer’s: reverence for life. He is Franciscan in seeking cooperation with God’s world of nature, not dominance. His beliefs are those of Thoreau, “I make myself rich by making my wants few.”

Everett Koop’s dietary message is: Stop doing what’s bad. Robbins’ is the opposite: Try doing what’s right. Koop says: If you don’t stop, you’ll die. Robbins says: If you try what’s right, you’ll live.…”