Official Review: Eating Whole For The Health Of It
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Official Review: Eating Whole For The Health Of It
[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Eating Whole For The Health Of It" by Becky Litwicki.]
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Like a lot of people, I am interested in eating a healthy diet and try to avoid junk food, but it has always seemed like a lot of work to me. There are so many diet plans out there and it seems like everyone has a completely different set of rules, so it is next to impossible to tell if something should be avoided at all costs or is an important dietary staple. I had heard of the whole food diet and movement, but I wasn’t really sure what it meant. I had vague notions that you were only allowed to eat vegetables and slabs of meat, which seemed impossible to me.
I came across Eating Whole For the Health of It by Becky Litwicki and her introduction seemed promising. The subtitle is Simple Ways to Ditch Foods That Destroy Your Health and Finally Give Your Body What It Craves. Litwicki starts off by acknowledging that the most important dietary concern for most of us is speed, convenience, and price and that the food industry today is geared toward selling pre-packaged meals and hundred calorie snack packs full of preservatives and high fructose corn syrup. This book advocates trying to eat food that is as minimally processed as possible because the natural state of food is best for our bodies.
The book starts out with an overview of what whole foods are and how to select them. Water, vegetables, grass-fed proteins, nuts, seeds, unrefined oils, and dairy are explored for their benefits and which choices offer the most benefit, while readers are cautioned to avoid fruit because of its high sugar content. Then Litwicki moves on to additives and toxins to be avoided, like high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, trans fats, preservatives, food coloring, and MSG. She teaches readers how to spot these additives on labels and the health risks that are associated with their consumption.
What follows is a guide to smart shopping and meal planning aimed to help shoppers think about their food choices in advance and keep only whole food choices stocked at home. She advocates eating organic as much as possible and shopping only at one or two stores that you are familiar with to make the shopping process faster and easier. Meal ideas, convenient ways to incorporate whole foods into snacks and smoothies, and how to motivate yourself to remain faithful to the whole food lifestyle are included to get readers started on the whole food path.
The book’s positive message of working at your own pace was something that I enjoyed. Instead of urging readers to immediately jump on the whole food bandwagon whole heartedly, Eating Whole For the Health of It encourages readers to take it slow and start with small changes made over time. It claims that the whole food lifestyle is a long term goal, so beginning by only reducing one’s consumption of processed foods a little bit at a time is still a positive move in the right direction.
Something that I both liked and disliked about Eating Whole For the Health of It was the author’s choice to include a number of links in the text to websites. It was interesting and convenient for me as I was reading the book from my computer, but it would have been more difficult to navigate from a basic kindle without wireless. Also, many of the links were to her Pinterest page, instead of to her separate website, which I found to be an unusual choice. Recipes were not included in the book itself and websites are prone to changes and can be shut down, so in that way I felt that the book limited itself by providing a shelf life to most of its resources.
One of the major problems I found with this book is that Litwicki is very sparing with details and sourcing. While web articles are a good source of information and publications by non-profits are generally solid resources, I would have liked to see more official studies or at the very least articles published in medical journals. Litwicki makes a lot of claims about potential health risks in the body of her work which she sources in a bibliography at the end. I would have found the book more compelling if she had more fully explained why certain foods are considered unhealthy instead of just stating that they are thought to cause a laundry list of ailments and diseases. It’s not that I question the validity of her claims or her sources, only that she would have made a much stronger argument for her case based off of the studies that her sources were based on. Several of her sources are Yahoo Shine, MSN Healthy Living, and the Opinions section of the Washington Post which I would not consider to be very reliable sources of medical information. With more reputable research, I would be much more inclined to take the claims of Eating Whole for the Health of It seriously.
I am giving Eating Whole for the Health of It two out of four stars. It was a good beginner’s guide to the whole food movement, but overall I felt that it lacked substance. I would have liked to have seen more information and depth to the book itself, and less direction to outside sources and websites.
***
Buy "Eating Whole For The Health Of It" on Amazon
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I came across Eating Whole For the Health of It by Becky Litwicki and her introduction seemed promising. The subtitle is Simple Ways to Ditch Foods That Destroy Your Health and Finally Give Your Body What It Craves. Litwicki starts off by acknowledging that the most important dietary concern for most of us is speed, convenience, and price and that the food industry today is geared toward selling pre-packaged meals and hundred calorie snack packs full of preservatives and high fructose corn syrup. This book advocates trying to eat food that is as minimally processed as possible because the natural state of food is best for our bodies.
The book starts out with an overview of what whole foods are and how to select them. Water, vegetables, grass-fed proteins, nuts, seeds, unrefined oils, and dairy are explored for their benefits and which choices offer the most benefit, while readers are cautioned to avoid fruit because of its high sugar content. Then Litwicki moves on to additives and toxins to be avoided, like high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, trans fats, preservatives, food coloring, and MSG. She teaches readers how to spot these additives on labels and the health risks that are associated with their consumption.
What follows is a guide to smart shopping and meal planning aimed to help shoppers think about their food choices in advance and keep only whole food choices stocked at home. She advocates eating organic as much as possible and shopping only at one or two stores that you are familiar with to make the shopping process faster and easier. Meal ideas, convenient ways to incorporate whole foods into snacks and smoothies, and how to motivate yourself to remain faithful to the whole food lifestyle are included to get readers started on the whole food path.
The book’s positive message of working at your own pace was something that I enjoyed. Instead of urging readers to immediately jump on the whole food bandwagon whole heartedly, Eating Whole For the Health of It encourages readers to take it slow and start with small changes made over time. It claims that the whole food lifestyle is a long term goal, so beginning by only reducing one’s consumption of processed foods a little bit at a time is still a positive move in the right direction.
Something that I both liked and disliked about Eating Whole For the Health of It was the author’s choice to include a number of links in the text to websites. It was interesting and convenient for me as I was reading the book from my computer, but it would have been more difficult to navigate from a basic kindle without wireless. Also, many of the links were to her Pinterest page, instead of to her separate website, which I found to be an unusual choice. Recipes were not included in the book itself and websites are prone to changes and can be shut down, so in that way I felt that the book limited itself by providing a shelf life to most of its resources.
One of the major problems I found with this book is that Litwicki is very sparing with details and sourcing. While web articles are a good source of information and publications by non-profits are generally solid resources, I would have liked to see more official studies or at the very least articles published in medical journals. Litwicki makes a lot of claims about potential health risks in the body of her work which she sources in a bibliography at the end. I would have found the book more compelling if she had more fully explained why certain foods are considered unhealthy instead of just stating that they are thought to cause a laundry list of ailments and diseases. It’s not that I question the validity of her claims or her sources, only that she would have made a much stronger argument for her case based off of the studies that her sources were based on. Several of her sources are Yahoo Shine, MSN Healthy Living, and the Opinions section of the Washington Post which I would not consider to be very reliable sources of medical information. With more reputable research, I would be much more inclined to take the claims of Eating Whole for the Health of It seriously.
I am giving Eating Whole for the Health of It two out of four stars. It was a good beginner’s guide to the whole food movement, but overall I felt that it lacked substance. I would have liked to have seen more information and depth to the book itself, and less direction to outside sources and websites.
***
Buy "Eating Whole For The Health Of It" on Amazon
Latest Review: The Crystilleries of Echoland by Dew Pellucid
