Customer Reviews

The RealAge Diet: Make Yourself Younger With What You Eat

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is an excellent book which educates the reader on nutrition, which lets one make informed decisions on healthy eating. What is most important is that the focus of the book is on the enjoyment of food, choosing foods which are healthy and fun.

The chapter looking at other popular diets is going to be the most controversial, as some well-established diets are, by Dr. Roizen's calculations, very unhealthy. This makes sense to me: a diet which is highly restrictive can't be healthy in the long term.

The chapter on how to make healthy food choices while at restaurants has been the most helpful for me - I have already started ordering dishes which aren't on the menu, and been very pleased with the results.

This is a great book, firmly based in science, which will make you eat healthier, and enjoy food more, if you follow its advice.

The connection between food and health is a strong one. Many diet-obsessed people overly focus on this one element of health though. This book builds from the RealAge research to help you change your eating habits in permanent, healthy ways. The book's weakness is that the recommended solutions require a lot of discipline to get started.

The book's conclusion that these changes will make you physiologically younger may well be a stretch. "To be honest, there's still a lot that scientists don't know about nutrition." That sentence is the most important one in the book. A new diet could be produced every year incorporating the latest research results, and each one would be different. I suspect that this continuing change in perceptions will go on for decades. So I suggest that you not take the results of any one diet book too seriously. Some of the key conclusions of each one will probably be contradicted in the future.

Nevertheless, this book is an attempt to point you toward eating habits that reduce diseases older people get more frequently and extend longevity. On the other hand, this book does not focus on appearance or weight level. Many people who read diet books are more interested in those two areas than longevity. If you are interested in another diet currently, this book probably reviews the other diet and gives you a rating for whether or not that diet will help extend longevity. The book is most positive about Eating Well for Optimum Health and Dean Ornish's Eat More, Weigh Less. The book's advice can be encapsulated as "Eat nutrient rich, calorie poor, and delicious." These foods include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meats, fish, and the right fats (eaten in moderation early in the meal). If you are familiar with books about nutrition, you won't find any big "'aha's" here. The main news is that eating fish seems to have benefits separate from eating the fats that are in fish. Now, I find that I feel a lot better if I eat fish 2 or 3 times a week. I suspect that listening to your body is often as reliable as the latest evidence.

Like many of the best books about nutrition and Sugarbusters!, this one warns about paying attention to glycemic levels of foods.

I did find its focus on calorie count to be questionable. The weight set-point for people differs a lot, and some people with slow metabolisms may find this approach just another painful way to be overweight. Calories do count, but picking your target is hard to do well. Spending a lot of time measuring calories will reduce consumption. If you have a high metabolism, the effort may well bring weight-loss rewards worth the effort.

The scientific references in the back of the book are impressive, but are not well connected to the text. You would have to do a lot of reading to find out what the research really says. I would like to have seen a closer connection between the footnotes and the text. Both Eating Well for Optimum Health and Live Right 4 Your Type are better in this area.

A clear conflict exists between this book and Live Right 4 Your Type. Both seem to be equally based on scientific research, except that Live Right 4 Your Type attempts to match the advice for your blood type. This book discusses the earlier book, Eat Right 4 Your Type, which does not closely match to research references. Based on my own experiences with both the average and the blood type adjusted approaches, I think the Live Right 4 Your Type method works better for me than the RealAge Diet.

If you have heart disease, you will have to modify some of those diets to reflect that by reducing fat (see Dean Ornish's Reversing Heart Disease).

If you are well read on nutrition, this book will not add much to your knowledge. If you eat poorly and have not read about nutrition, this is a fine book for you.

I would like to commend the section in the book on eating out. There are many good ideas for how to have your food prepared in healthier ways. Even if you know nutrition, you may find the book to be a valuable asset for this reason if you are passive in restaurants.

The book also advises doing a lot of your own cooking. That's not for me. The recipes looked too hard to me to be worth looking into. You may have a different reaction. If you do, enjoy!

After you read this book, you should also think about how much effort it is worth to extend your lifespan. If you spend 10 percent of your waking hours to expand your life by five percent, is that an accomplishment? Depending on how you spend your time, it may or may not be. For example, if you live enough longer than a cure comes along that extends your life by another 10 percent, you're ahead. If you enjoy working on this, you are ahead also. If you have more energy to give to others, you may be ahead also.

Also, you might want to check out Dean Ornish's Love and Survival where he points out that human relationships have more impact on disease and health than diet.

Make food a positive part of your life!

I love the RealAge diet. What I like best is that Dr. Roizen explains WHY you should eat certain foods and avoid others. Since he helps you to understand the effect different foods have on your body, you can learn to make good choices at the supermarket or restaurant instead of having to memorize a food list. I have lost five pounds since going on this diet a month ago, but even more importantly, my energy level has gone way up. I have given this book as a gift to both my grown children.

Buy this book for the captivating presentation of the results of lots of nutritional research. I've learned so much about how different foods affect our bodies. They're not selling you on some gimmicky diet. They give you a great deal of knowledge to make good decisions on your own about what to eat. You'll be shocked by all the truly nasty things that are put into food that Americans normally eat. You'll no longer have to wonder why we're plagued by obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer. I highly recommend this to anyone.

This is a very practical and easy to understand book. It is not another "diet" book, rather, it encourages a life style change. I have recommended to to many of my friends who have expressed similar thoughts about it. I like that it addresses supplements and foods it terms of value and amount.

When it comes to calculating "true age" I feel 20+ on a good day, 50+ on a realistic day and 110 on my worst days! While there may be certain diets that might help me to "feel" younger and healthier, there is no diet that is going to "make" me younger. Whether we like it or not, time marches on and before you know it another birthday has rolled around, reminding us in a realistic way that we have used up one more year of our life here on Earth. Taking this into consideration, and short of a trip to "Never-Never Land" or finding the proverbial "Fountain of Youth", my chances of growing younger appear quite slim.

I did enjoy this book to a certain point for the information it contained and for the assessment of other well-known diets; however, the authors came across just a little too self-satisfied for my liking. Of course, every author thinks his/her diet is absolutely the best thing since sliced bread and will set the world on fire; a strong marketing strategy is what sells books, but what really irked me about this book was the constant referrals to the authors' web site. If I had wanted to find the information on a web site, I would not have bothered to purchase the book in the first place.

The approach in this book is a new concept and to the book's credit it does provide a thorough analysis of various foods, so readers will have to weigh the pros against the cons and decide for themselves if this is a book they want to purchase. Personally, I would recommend, "Eat Right For Your Blood Type" long before this one.

The 'Mother' of all dietbooks... the singular standard to which all dietbooks and all-to-come must be compared!... The eminently-readable text and the interesting anecdotes and vignettes (in the form of RealAge cafe tips) render the book easily digestible!.... In tandem with "RealAge: Are you as young as you can be?", "The RealAge Diet" is a medically-compelling, must-read tome for all who aspire to live a healthful and holistic lifestyle.

I liked the first "Realage" book but I found this one very disappointing in its assessment of the low carb, high protein ways of eating. In terms of other things too, like the dangers of eggs and egg yolks, its research seems behind the times. The latest research suggests (see The Schwarzbein Principle + other sources) that the body does not make extra LDL cholesterol - the dangerous kind - from eggs. This book still insists it does. In fact, the scientific evidence that the body makes ANY cholesterol directly from dietary fats appears to be less than conclusive.

Even when dealing with - perhaps - the most extreme low carb way of eating, Atkins, it bases most of its criticisms on a phase of the programme that may last no more than two weeks. It also omits to mention that practically all the other low carb books it assesses DO stress exercise as an important part of health. Incidentally, most low carb programmes cite many more sources to back up their claims than Roizen is willing to admit. He and his advisors apprently do not even know the difference between ketosis and ketoacidosis.

Almost everyone who has tried these ways of eating notices weight loss, greater energy and a greater sense of well being. .... And yet they repeatedly read statements in books like Roizen's that tell them they should be feeling lousy and fatigued. Not only that, their blood cholesterol levels actually improve. People who choose these programmes are usually VERY careful to get cholesterol levels checked regularly. I know directly of at least one Type 2 diabetic who is surprising her doctors by going against the standard advice and doing low carb and halving her blood sugar levels.

My own experience? 25lbs of weight lost in a few months, the cessation of 15 years of digestive problems and recurrent diarrhea that had me convinced I had Irritable Bowel Disease (Roizen claims these diets could not help that, or that it must be psychosomatic if they do), and a major drop in blood pressure. I will be getting my blood chemistry checked soon, but I do not expect bad news.

I'm not writing particularly to boost these diets, in fact I bought Roizen's book for a second opinion on them, but such apparently wilful misreprentation of them, and scepticism, only makes me question the essentially conservative nature of much of his information.

It appears to be old wine in a new bottle, and tainted wine at that.

The author does a great job sharing healthy eating ideas. I love most of this book, however I could have done without the comparisons of major trendy diets. The book is a good purchase.

Full of pratical information and easy to understand. I liked the details about the foods and typical diet trends and thier affects on our bodies. Recommended to anyone trying to live a clean lifestyle.