Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was disappointed with this book. After being intrigued by Buettner's now famous NYT Magazine article "The Island Where People Forgot to Die," I expected to find this fuller discussion chock full of insights and carefully researched data. It is not. Buettner has in many cases repeated oft-cited but now discredited views about nutrition that sometimes actually run counter to the practices of the very peoples he wants us to emulate. For example, he repeatedly advocates a low fat diet despite the fact that more recent scientific research finds no significant health benefits to such a plan and even some potential drawbacks. But when he does include meat in the recipes designed to emulate a Blue Zone meal, he makes it lower in fat (esp. saturated fat) than what was advocated by the natives. It seems not to have occurred to Buettner that there may well be a very good reason for the pork belly in Okinawan cuisine rather than lean pork loin. Elsewhere he recommends diminishing dairy consumption because dairy is a relative late comer to the human diet, being introduced with the domestication of animals about 8,000-10,000 years ago. But he sees no problem with whole grains being a significant part of the diet, including it as one of the 4 super foods for daily consumption. Grains are also late comers to the human diet (along with legumes), and the bran of whole wheat contains phytic acid which leaches calcium (and other minerals) from our bodies. So reducing dairy while increasing whole wheat could be problematic (not to mention again the significant inclusion of dairy among the Ikarians). The examples like this are numerous. It is very probably true that we can indeed eat all these foods in healthful combinations. But the aim should be for nutritional density, foods which give us the most nutritional bang for our caloric buck. This certainly includes the wide range of plant foods he advocates (along with legumes), but it should also include animal protein, esp. organ meats which get no attention in the book but are certainly part of traditional eating (the whole animal, not specialized cuts as in American supermarkets). Much better in this regard is Denise Minger's Death by Food Pyramid, which examines the Mediterranean diet amongst others for seeing what healthful diets have in common with much greater insight and deeper analysis than Blue Zones Solution.