Customer Reviews

The Jungle Effect: A Doctor Discovers the Healthiest Diets from Around the World--Why They Work and How to Bring Them Home

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's a travelogue, a nutrition advice book (complete with case studies), and a cookbook, too. Writing in the first person, Daphne Miller brings these three books together into one fun read. She's adventurous and curious, which makes a book about preventing diabetes, cancer and depression into a delight. Who'd have thought!

Several ideas come together here: "Cold spots" are places in which chronic Western diseases are noticeably absent. Miller explores what and how people eat in the cold spots. Then she cites the research showing why a particular indigenous diet provides protection against a particular condition. She was led to the cold spots in her efforts to help individual patients who were struggling with health issues--and whose ethnic heritage is tied to the cold spot. That's another piece of the puzzle: in this fast-food world, it's not easy to maintain the ideal diet as usually presented: fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meats, and varying advice on carbs. " But a Mexican "cold spot" diet might be easier for a Chicana patient to stick with. The foods might appeal to cultural memory, or even an individual's memories of grandmother's cooking. Sure enough, it turns out that way, as Miller returns from cold spots with traditional recipes to share with her patients. For example, a Scandinavian patient, who turns up her nose at ubiquitous California salads, turns out to love the Icelandic diet with plenty of berries, fish, and waxy potatoes. And eating the Icelandic way helps her out of a serious depression. Miller explains how it works.

The book invites us to eat our way around the world and learn the principles of each indigenous diet. We can sample from Camaroon, Crete, Okinawa and more. The recipes look good--I haven't tried them yet-- and are written to incorporate ingredients easily available in most US towns. Miller finds out about the recipes by peeking into kitchens and cooking with locals, who are colorfully portrayed. I found inspiration for healthy eating in this book, and learned a lot about the mechanisms behind the adage "we are what we eat."

I should tell you that Dr Miller is our family doctor. She's just as devoted to her patients as it seems in the book. And her constant scan of medical and nutrition research has helped our whole family. While I haven't made any of the recipes yet, I recognize changes we have already made based on her advice.

`The Jungle Effect` is what Dr. Miller noticed when her San Francisco practice patients went on a "native diet". Unlike typical Western diets, which caused her patients health problems, when they switched to native diets - traditional foods from native cultures - their health improved, often dramatically. To learn more about native diets, Dr. Miller visited places such as Iceland, Nigeria, Crete, the Amazon, Okinawa to discover what they are doing right. Thousands of years of human trial and error, according to Dr. Miller, have selected for the best diets for human health and longevity.

Dr. Miller is not new in this approach. Dr. Weston A. Price in the 1930s observed the same heath giving benefits of traditional foods and today there is a large and active community of native nutritionists surrounding Price and his legacy (see Sally Fallon's classic Nourishing Traditions). However Miller's book does offer some new and interesting perspectives. She actually traveled to native regions and sampled the foods and diets, and this makes for fascinating reading in an up to date journalistic human-interest story style. She dispels the notion that genetics plays a significant role, suggesting that anyone of an ethnic background can adopt any native diet (eg. a European can benefit from an Okinawa diet). Finally, she suggests food is more than its parts, each dish is symbiotic, so it is important to eat the entire food way, not just its elements. For example olive oil is good, but best in combination with the entire Mediterranean diet. Oddly enough, she also recommends mixing and matching various native diets (she personally cooks from different regions each night).

Dr. Miller's book is an excellent primer for anyone not already familiar with native nutrition. Her research supports and adds to the work done by the Weston A. Price Foundation, with a slightly different approach. Her field-trips make for excellent reading and reveal specific regional food-ways. `The Jungle Effect` is a valuable contribution to the growing literature, and an easy and fun to read introduction to native nutrition.

The old cliche is true - Dr. Miller has been my personal doctor for years and proved it to me. Her approach helped my health and well-being tremendously and is so logical and common sense - it's a shame that more doctors don't use nutrition as the first line of defense and offense for good health.

I expected it to be an interesting resource with some good recipes - but it is a highly readable and inspiring book. Worth owning and living by!!

From: www.BasilAndSpice.com
Author & Book Views On A Healthy Life!

The Jungle Effect: A Doctor Discovers the Healthiest Diets from Around the World--Why They Work and How to Bring Them Home (Collins Living, 2008) by Daphne Miller, M.D.

Daphne Miller, M.D. author of The Jungle Effect, writes that indigenous foods, or native plants, vegetables, and fruits, are the natural prescription solution and even prevention for type 2 diabetes. Past studies of Pacific Islanders and Australian Aborigines have shown that when these peoples eliminated their own native diets, for the Western high carb diet, they quickly developed pre-diabetes or full-blown diabetes. Indigenous diets include nuts, roots, and seeds like cheeky yam, black bean seed, and bush onion. Others you may be more familiar with: quinoa, barley kernels, cracked wheat (bulgur), steel-cut oats, and millet.

Further testing of the indigenous foods showed that they were difficult to break apart and digest. Blood sugar and insulin levels rose more slowly after eating these foods, whereas Western carbs --refined flour, sugar, pasta, mass-produced corn, white rice--digest quickly, rapidly raising blood sugar and insulin, leading to diabetes.

In The Jungle Effect: A Doctor Discovers the Healthiest Diets from Around the World--Why They Work and How to Bring Them Home, Dr. Miller gives five reasons why slow release indigenous foods are antidiabetic:

* Slow-release foods are slowly digested--keeping blood sugar and insulin levels lower.

* Slow-release foods are fiber-rich--extending satiety, decreasing the desire for fast-release snacks (donuts, candy, etc..)

* Slow-release foods are nutrient-rich--unrefined grains have not lost their vitamin and mineral properties from the refining process. For example, white flour retains only 15% of its magnesium content after the refining. Dr. Miller writes that "Low-blood magnesium levels are linked to insulin resistance, poor blood sugar control, and diabetic complications."

* Slow-release foods are free of bad fats--saturated, partially hydrogenated, omega 6. Instead they contain stanols and sterols, healthy plant fats, which lower triglycerides.

* Slow-release foods have unique antidiabetic capabilities. Some specific indigenous foods cause sensitivity to insulin--some herbs, spices, and the prickly pear cactus.

A wonderful example of a slow-release meal is the corn tortilla, filled with beans, accompanied by squash, jicama, herbs, spices (cinnamon, pepper, cumin, coriander), and nopales (prickly pear cactus).

First, purchase or make tortillas that have 3 grams minimum of fiber each, have been treated with lime, are organic (if possible), and are free from hydrogenated fat and preservatives.

If you have a choice, cook your own beans. They are usually fresher, cheaper, tastier, less salty, and digest more slowly than the canned varieties.

Squashes, both the hard winter types and summer varieties, have been eaten in the Americas for several thousand years, says Dr. Miller. They are chock full of vitamins, minerals, and fiber.

Jicama, easily peeled and eaten raw, can be sliced into small slices and dressed in lime juice and chili powder.

Look for the prickly pear in Latino/Hispanic/Middle Eastern markets. Stick to small, tender, and bright green ones.

BackStory: "In the past 70 years, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the United States has increased over 700 percent, and the disease is slowly affecting younger and younger populations. While this is the case with people of all ethnicities, the most dramatic rise has been experienced by Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans. Furthermore, recent statistics have shown that diabetes is now taking center stage as one of the greatest health issues worldwide."--Dr. Daphne Miller

Daphne Miller, M.D. traveled around the world investigating the diets of many native peoples. She is a board certified family physician in private practice in San Francisco and an associate professor at the University of California, where she teaches nutrition and integrative medicine.

The Jungle Effect--I highly encourage you to read this book for better insight on your diet and health.--Kelly Jad'on

5 Stars

I just loved this book, too, and probably will never read another diet book again. "The Jungle Effect" is really not a diet book - it's the Occam's razor of human dietary habits, the way our ancestors have always eaten for survival. Working only a block away from Dr. Miller's office, I've been tempted to walk down there to get the book autographed and buy ten more for my family and friends. I probably won't do that, but I definitely will do my best to promote it to people I know. I've already started making changes in my husband's and my diet and it's been a joyous, life-enhancing and elegant experience.

By comparing the sort of meals that Americans are used to eating to, say, an African meal, Dr. Miller conveys an eye-opening epiphany. It should come as no surprise that the fiber content in African meals actually prevents the development of colon cancer. It's not a big mystery, but we're always looking for complicated schemes and sophisticated medical breakthroughs for answers, when the solution is pretty darn obvious and really pretty simple.

I think that readers will also enjoy the travel diary experience as Dr. Miller wends her way not only through remote highlands in Mexico, but the wilds of Walmart in the Central Valley. She really wants to help everyone find a solution, regardless of their status or income and to be able to do it with any and all available resources. What a wonderful book. What great medicine.

The Jungle Effect is a very well informed and well written book on healthy nutrition. Dr. Miller identifies various "cold spots" around the globe which have low or no rates of certain western diseases, and explains how the local diets are key to these statistical results. I use this book and the diets and recipes therein to plan my own diet that is tailored to my ulcerative colitis. The book is very well organized and very accessible. I strongly recommend this book to anyone looking to plan an informed new whole foods diet. Try the Ndole--it's great!

Heard Miller interviewed on NPR and pulled over to order the book on my iPhone, she was that interesting. The book holds up--lots of good information collected together for someone trying to make practical changes in their diet for health. Only wish there were more recipes! What's there is good and not hard to make, but there are only 14 or so.

The Jungle Effect is excellent and interesting, and is having a very beneficial effect on my life. Daphne MIller,MD, effectively combines her information about the very healthy foods and lifestyles of people in the different cultures she visits because of their very low disease rates with her medical knowledge and research. She makes it all come to life with individual patients of hers who needed and used these healthy diets, and with recipes and lists of foods from each of the five areas. It's a goldmine of useful information. The book's only real shortcoming is lack of an index.

I am pretty pleased with this book overall...and highly recommend it. It's a narrative of native diets as they relate to the physician's patients. However, there are some quibbles I have with the book.

Most people don't really understand what their chief health risks are - so it would have been nice to show overall risk assessment as part of the equation - i.e. most people in the U.S. will die from heart disease. So perhaps that ailment should have gotten more attention. For instance, breast cancer, albeit important, is responsible for 40,000 deaths per year. On the other hand, diabetes costs the U.S. much more than many other diseases, so perhaps it should have been weighted heavily.

Here are the CDC mortality rates for 2006:

Heart disease: 631,636
Cancer: 559,888
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599
Diabetes: 72,449
Alzheimer's disease: 72,432
Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,326
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,344
Septicemia: 34,234

Anyway, the book is very, very good and has helped me understand the WHY of dietary guidance given by high quality sources which I never really understood before. Understanding the WHY makes it all much more logical and reasonable.

In the past 6 weeks, I've stopped all sugar, caffeine and carbs and lost 10 lbs. on a mostly meat-fish-chicken-nuts and veggies and fruits diet with a small amount of dairy. This book makes me think I will return to my more usual preference for less beef and more beans. And though I love fish, the depletion of fish is another crisis we face and I wonder what advice there is for getting the omega 3 benefits of fish or if taking cod liver oil is going to be enough. Let's hope the good doctor has another book in her - maybe one that can combine health and the environment to a greater degree. But I'll bet her publisher wants a recipe book next. :)

I saw a review of this book on NPR, found it on Amazon, ordered it and devowered it upon arrival. WOW!!! Exceptional book, interesting theroies and research, well thought out follow up, AND good recipies. What more could any health consious gal want???