Customer Reviews

Toxic Fat: When Good Fat Turns Bad

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From: www.BasilAndSpice.com

Book Review: Toxic Fat: When Good Fat Turns Bad (Thomas Nelson, 2008)

by Barry Sears

"If you have a chronic disease (diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, cancer, or a neurological disorder), it's quite likely that a major underlying cause of your current condition comes from seemingly well-meaning governmental agricultural programs initiated more than 30 years ago."--Dr.Barry Sears

Dr. Sears spent two years researching Toxic Fat. This new book may be a bit controversial, but it may also be groundbreaking as the general public begins to read about why our country's citizens have physically changed during the last 25 years.

Dr. Sears mapped out Toxic Fat in 13 chapters covering: the obesity epidemic, nutrition, inflammation, good and toxic fat, toxic fat syndrome, his Zone plan, fish oil benefits, anti-inflammatory meals and recipes.

The Toxic Fat Syndrome--What is it?

Dr. Sears writes that the condition occurs when obesity is viewed as inflammation-induced and is either benign or malignant. As malignant, the fat acts like a tumor, it quickly spreads to every organ in the body. The process begins with excess body fat, spreading through the blood, resulting with chronic disease--Alzheimer's, allergies, asthma, Type-2 diabetes, cancer, heart disease. Signs of the silent inflammation are high triglycerides, low HDL, and high insulin.

Toxic Fat also includes several appendixes which should NOT be skipped over, but read thoroughly as they provide explanations from a doctor-researcher's understanding, made comprehensible to the general public.

* Blood Testing For Silent Inflammation--an important section about what you need to do for yourself.

* Hormones--"While some hormones, such as estrogen, testosterone, and growth hormone, do decrease with age, others--such as insulin and pro-inflammatory eicosanoids--increase with age....Ultimately by controlling both insulin and eicosanoids, you will achieve the fountain of youth (improved wellness) by reversing Toxic Fat Syndrome."

* Fish Oil--Covers usage, history of fish oil, problems with eating contaminated fish.

* Insulin Resistance--author explains that the problem begins in adipose tissue.

* Nutrigenomics--the diet affects the genes, mentions reservatrol (a wellness buzzword), fruits and vegetables as a necessity, aspirin usage.

* Zone Food Blocks--this idea is revisited from prior published books.

Key Points of Toxic Fat:

* Being overweight or obese is not necessarily your fault, but rather is a reflection of "adverse interaction of your genes with radical changes that have taken place in the American diet over the past 25 years."

* "Everything you have heard about the `cause' and the `cure' for the current obesity epidemic is probably dead wrong."

* Obesity is a form of cancer driven by inflammation.

* Some extra body fat can be good.

* Lean doesn't always mean a person is healthy.

* Eating less and exercising more may not work.

* Toxic Fat Syndrome is caused by diet.

* Results from a changed diet will occur within 30 days.

* Diet must include low fat protein, low glycemic carbohydrates, and high dose fish oil.

* Super fish oil contains GLA and will slow the rate of aging.

Another buzzword in the weight loss and wellness community is fish oil. Dr. Sears, a researcher in the dietary control of inflammation, has included an entire chapter and an Appendix devoted to the subject in Toxic Fat.

Toxic Fat's recipes are simple to prepare and utilize common ingredients--lean meats, low-fat dairy, beans, spices, herbs, vegetables, fruits. Each recipe is divided into a man's or woman's portion requirement. Examples:

* Crab Bisque--uses skim or 1% milk

* Taco Burger--bun free, prepared with 90% fat-free ground beef

* Apple and Cheese Melt--uses low-fat mozzarella

Key to this book, is the Bibliography, where Dr. Sears notes his numerous pages of research.

Toxic Fat is written from a doctor's medical viewpoint, so that the typical reader can understand what the new research means, how it can be applied, and how weight can be lost. A controversial book, Dr. Sears writes that our obesity epidemic's roots were planted back in the 1980s when refined carbohydrates (pop/soda, candy, processed foods), and some oils (soy, corn) became cheap. This paired with our dramatic decrease in the consumption of fish oil created what he calls the Perfect Nutritional Storm. Toxic Fat builds upon Dr. Sears's past books--The Zone, Omega Rx Zone. Not just a do this and lose weight book, Toxic Fat follows the modern scope of wellness for the whole body--which includes weight loss as prevention of further disease. Toxic Fat puts real-time information in the hands of its readers and sets them on the road to recovery and wellness.

A former research scientist at the Boston University School of Medicine and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Barry Sears is the author of several health books, selling more than 5 million copies. He continues his research into the dietary control of inflammation at his non-profit Inflammation Research Foundation.

A BestSeller Review

5 Stars

I got my copy of TFS a few days ago and was able to make my way through it in a single (long) night. It is a quick read, especially if you are familiar with the concepts from his previous books and don't have to re-read some of the more dense material.

I thought the book was excellent! It was certainly focused and you could tell that Dr. Sears went to a lot of effort to make the book digestible for new comers. He saved much of the science for the appendix section and even that was slightly watered down when compared to some of his other books.

In the past I have been very critical of folks that suffer from all the modern day afflictions caused by the food they eat yet, apparently, make no effort to change their habits. This book is extremely enlightening in that sense.

My only complaints, if there are any to be made, is that I felt like the book may have been a little too focused on the idea of 'toxic fat' and there were too many pages dedicated to recipes. Obviously this was a conscious decision by Dr Sears and when all of his books are viewed as a whole this complaint is pretty bogus.

The core message remains basically the same since 'Enter The Zone'. Each successive book is a slight evolution of his original dietary/lifestyle recommendations to make them either more effective or palpable to the general public. Each book supports those recommendations from slightly different angles and serves to deepen the argument for them.

What Dr Sears has built over the years is a pool of literature that justifies and explains a method to dramatically improve the health and well being of individuals and seems to be the only way out of what is increasingly being acknowledged as a worldwide inflammation epidemic.

Dr Sears simply does not get enough credit for what he has done. I would highly encourage anyone remotely interested in their health and well being to read his latest work and then head straight to the book store to pick up all of his other books. You will not regret it.

This book is an update to the series of books Sear's has written since 1993. It has new information for long-time Zone followers like me, but it was written for a newcomer. It must have been tough to write a book that contains years of developments, yet is simple enough for a novice to comprehend. Sear's did this by putting complex explanations in appendices. The text itself is about 150 pages, with the other half of the book containing the appendices and recipes.

The book puts forth the most convincing argument on why you need to eat according the Zone diet of any of Sear's books. The cancer analogy didn't work well for me, probably because I don't know much about tumors. That aside, after reading the book, you realize that most of America is doomed to poor health. It is too easy to eat poorly, and too disciplined to stay in the Zone. Only a few will experience the Zone's benefits and swim against the tide of cheap, fast food.

If you are new to the Zone, read this book and do the diet for a month. Q: What do you have to lose if you don't? A: Your quality of life, and worse.

This book is amazing. I read it and I'm using the recipes. Within two months I feel like a new person. Losing weight...blood pressure is down. It was sooo high. I feel better and have so much energy.

this is a GREAT book. i use it with all my clients(i'm a sports nutritionist). only days after using the diet and supplements that this diet explains, i started (and still do) feeling better than i ever have, in every way that i can think of. i'm turning 35 & after about 3 weeks of following this book i am down to about the same weight i was 12-15 years ago.

Here it's the most revolutionary book from Dr Barry Sears in 10 years.

Obesity can be explained perfectly as a kind of cancer

Are you overweight? You can be healthy if you dont have toxic fat in your bloodstream. You simply have a benign tumor.

Are you perfectly slim? You can even be an olympic athlete and have toxic fat.

America health crisis is not due to obesity, but due to silent inflammation which is explained by Toxic Fat in blood, free for attacking your organs.

Here there is a new medical approach for understanding and cure:

- Obesity

- Heart Disease

- Cancer

- Alzheimer, parkison and mental disease

...

and why an anti-inflammatory diet like Zone plus high dose fish oil can revert this.

Everyone who concerns about obesity, health, diseases..must read this book. Every library should have this book.. Its the most enlightening book about obesity/health I have read probably in my life.

I've got pretty much every book Barry Sears ever wrote. So I know about the Zone diet, the physiology of it (insulin, eicosanoids, etc.), all those things he's been breaking ground with for years. Although I revere the man (he's never gotten enough credit for developing his diet and all the truly useful science he's made available to us laypeople, a fact that annoys me intensely), there are a few of his books that I was kind of sorry I bought because they seemed essentially to be repackaged older books. Other people have made that comment, too, and rightly so. But not this book.

All my life I have been a "junk food junkie", and it has hampered my success with any diet regimen I've ever undertaken, including the Zone. The science outlined in Sear's older work made it plain to me why I use food to self-medicate, but that information could also be found in other places. However, as I've gotten older the cravings have gotten worse and it's become increasingly difficult to control them. In this book Sears takes the information in his old books and synthesizes it into something essentially new, and even more informative. He fills in the gaps for people like me who have the almost uncontrollable urge to eat and have always wondered why.

I don't usually write reviews but I'm only on page 39 and had to stop and do it. This book is already a revelation to me and I highly recommend it.

The most cutting-edge nutrition expert of our day has got to be Zone Diet creator Dr. Barry Sears. Long before anyone was talking about inflammation as a root cause in heart disease and other health issues, he was coming up with solutions to the problem that now is becoming more and more evident is the primary reason why people are suffering from heart attacks, cardiovascular issues, and even death.

Don't be fooled by the title, though. Dr. Sears is NOT describing dietary fat that you consume in your daily meals, but rather that fat that just sits there in your abdomen and never goes away. He believes that fat is "toxic" because it is a sign of the untreated inflammation that can and will lead to greater health problems down the road.

Attacking it with an aggressive specialized fish oil treatment along with the Zone dietary approach can "reverse toxic fat syndrome in 30 days." That's what Dr. Sears says will happen and has the case studies of real people who have done it to prove his point. Whether you buy into the Zone diet or not, this book is well worth it just for the information on reducing inflammation to slow down the aging process, improve heart health, and restore your overall health to where it needs to be. That's something you can trust Dr. Sears will watch out for. He always has!

Good news! It's not your fault you're fat, it's good to be a bit fat (if not inflamed) and overweight people often outlive normal people.

This is the best book I have read so far that explains that it's not really about the fat; it's about the inflammation (and how to get rid of it).

Using the metaphor "The Perfect Nutritional Storm," Sears guides us through the history of how cheap food became available in the USA: not the good fruits and vegetables, but rather the cheap omega-6 fats and high glycemic carb foods. He points specifically to three factors that have created this health disaster in the USA.

The nice thing about Dr. Sears' books is that you don't have to read the previous ones to understand the material because he always has nice summaries of his prior discoveries---so this book includes info on not only the inflammation issue, but also the Zone diet and fish oil.

If you've ever been envious of someone who can eat all they want and not gain weight, you won't be after reading this book. It's not only the overweight who are susceptible to toxic problems. And an overweight person can even be healthy. Sears claims that the heaviest man in the world went on this diet and lost 400 pounds (at the time of the writing) and even long before reaching his ideal weight, achieved very ideal blood chemistry.

Sears takes us on a tour of the hormones of hunger. You will better understand the delicate balance of what causes hunger when you read this.

I wonder if someone could come up with a raw food vegetarian zone diet. That would be the Perfect Antidote to the Perfect Nutritional Storm.

I've read Dr Sears previous books and found them excellent. The data in "Toxic Fat" is similar but explained much better. This is the best book on diet & health I have ever read.