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Matt Fitzgerald

Diet Cults: The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide to Healthy Eating for the Rest of US Hardcover – May 15, 2014

by Matt Fitzgerald (Author)

137 ratings

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From the national bestselling author of Racing Weight, Matt Fitzgerald exposes the irrationality, half-truths, and downright impossibility of a “single right way” to eat, and reveals how to develop rational, healthy eating habits.

From “The Four Hour Body,” to “Atkins,” there are diet cults to match seemingly any mood and personality type. Everywhere we turn, someone is preaching the “One True Way” to eat for maximum health. Paleo Diet advocates tell us that all foods less than 12,000 years old are the enemy. Low-carb gurus demonize carbs, then there are the low-fat prophets. But they agree on one thing: there is only one true way to eat for maximum health. The first clue that that is a fallacy is the sheer variety of diets advocated. Indeed, while all of these competing views claim to be backed by “science,” a good look at actual nutritional science itself suggests that it is impossible to identify a single best way to eat. Fitzgerald advocates an agnostic, rational approach to eating habits, based on one’s own habits, lifestyle, and genetics/body type. Many professional athletes already practice this “Good Enough” diet, and now we can too and ditch the brainwashing of these diet cults for good.

Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pegasus Books
Publication date

May 15, 2014
Dimensions

6.3 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
ISBN-10

9781605985602
ISBN-13

978-1605985602
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Matt Fitzgerald
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Editorial Reviews

Review

A delicious read. I am always amazed at how much I learn from Matt Fitzgerald's books. Diet Cults dives into the human nature, psychology, and pleasure aspect of food. I devoured it. --Shalene Flanagan, Olympic Bronze Medalist"

In this book, Fitzgerald takes aim at the long list of dietary approaches that claim to be the "One True Way" to eat healthily, arguing instead for what he calls "agnostic healthy eating." The key (which he has introduced in previous books) is a ranking of 10 categories of food, and the goal is simply that, wherever a food falls in that hierarchy, you should generally aim to have more of the foods that rank above it and less of the foods that rank below it. And you know what? I agree. You can quibble about some of the details, but this is not a bad description of the way I aim to eat. I'll eat anything, more or less, but always aiming to have more of the things at the top of the ladder than at the bottom. If you're a fellow dietary agnostic, the book is worth a read. --Alex Hutchinson"

I highly recommend reading Racing Weight even if you don t need to lose any excess poundage. You ll come away with a better understanding of your physiology and also of food. --Joe Friel, author of The Triathlete's Training Bible and The Cyclist's Training Bible"

Racing Weight answers the difficult questions athletes often have about dieting, including how to handle the off-season. The book gives readers a scientifically backed system to discover your optimum race weight, as well as five steps to achieve it. "

Sports nutritionist Matt Fitzgerald lets us in on his no-diet secrets that can help endurance athletes get leaner, stronger, and faster. "

I highly recommend reading Racing Weight even if you don't need to lose any excess poundage. You'll come away with a better understanding of your physiology and also of food. --Joe Friel, author of The Triathlete's Training Bible and The Cyclist's Training Bible

Racing Weight answers the difficult questions athletes often have about dieting, including how to handle the off-season. The book gives readers a scientifically backed system to discover your optimum race weight, as well as five steps to achieve it.

Sports nutritionist Matt Fitzgerald lets us in on his no-diet secrets that can help endurance athletes get leaner, stronger, and faster.

About the Author

Matt Fitzgerald is an acclaimed endurance sports and nutrition writer and a certified sports nutritionist. He is the bestselling author of more than a dozen books on running and fitness, including 80/20 Running, How Bad Do You Want It, Racing Weight, and Iron War, which was long-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and Diet Cults, also available from Pegasus Books. He is a columnist on Competitor.com and Active.com, and has contributed to Bicycling, Men’s Health, Triathlete, Men’s Journal, Outside, Runner’s World, Shape, and Women’s Health. He lives in San Diego, California.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1605985600
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pegasus Books; 1st edition (May 15, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781605985602
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1605985602
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.01 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches

Customer Reviews:
137 ratings

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Matt Fitzgerald

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Matt Fitzgerald is an award-winning endurance sports journalist and bestselling author of more than 20 books on running, triathlon, fitness, nutrition, and weight loss, including Brain Training for Runners and Racing Weight. His byline appears regularly in national publications including Men's Journal, Outside, and Women's Running. An experienced running and triathlon coach and certified sports nutritionist, Matt serves as a Training Intelligence Specialist for PEAR Sports and as a featured coach on active.com.

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4.2 out of 5

137 global ratings

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mutualcore

Awesome

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 20, 2017

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Over 65 years ago in The True Believer , Eric Hoffer surmised that political and religious fanaticism stemmed from underlying feelings of inadequacy or self-hatred. So it is with dietary fanaticism as well. People’s desperation to lose weight, or in the case vegetarians and vegans, guilt over eating animal products, will carry them to extreme lengths, and make them susceptible to nutritional claims which are bogus, if not dangerous.

In my own case, I went vegan at age 17 after watching EARTHLINGS . I highly recommend people watch that movie so they can be conscientious of issues of animal suffering, but the trauma of my viewing experience blinded me to the devastation that was about to follow. After only one year of being vegan (and a mostly raw vegan at that), I was suffering from chronic indigestion, irritability, hair loss, emaciation, and acne, which I barely ever got in the thick of puberty. After switching to the McDougall Diet, a very low-fat vegan diet based on cooked starches, the acne persisted, and I now suffered from toothaches, constipation, and dry eyes. This madness continued for almost 3 years, and I always thought my health problems could be stopped by taking this or that supplement, or by tweaking my diet within the overall framework of veganism or "plant-based." Moreover, on those occasions when I did cheat on animal products, I would beat myself up about it, then vow to eat vegan harder and more diligently than ever before. This is the sort of disordered eating Matt Fitzgerald is trying to prevent.

One negative reviewer of this book stated that Fitzgerald owes Loren Cordain an apology since the top four foods in Fitzgerald’s “diet hierarchy,” vegetables, fruits, nuts/seeds, and high-quality meats, are essentially the Paleo Diet. Ignoring that there IS evidence of hunter-gatherers consuming grains and legumes (plus honey- another food foolishly banned by Cordain), and that hybridized, agricultural foods are extremely different from the wild foods consumed by hunter-gatherers, this misses the point entirely about what constitutes “diet cults.” They’re not about balance, inclusivity, moderation, or nuance. They’re about certain foods being monolithically good, others being monolithically bad. Even if Cordain himself is OK with a little cheating on the Paleo Diet, he still bears responsibility for the Puritans in his movement, due to his categorical demonization of grains, legumes, and dairy- portraying them as the root cause of everything from obesity to type II diabetes to heart disease to cancer to leaky gut and autoimmune disorders, and literal toxins even. Whenever you categorically demonize a food, people are naturally going to assume that the less they eat of it, the healthier they’re going to be, when that’s not necessarily the case.

In conclusion, here are my five biggest indicators someone is in a diet cult. If any of these apply to you, you need to read Fitzgerald’s book ASAP!

1. You think any health problems a person experiences on your diet are due to improperly following the diet, not the diet itself. Gaining weight, or feeling sluggish, cold, constipated, or nauseous on your low carb diet? Well, you’re just eating too much protein, not enough fat. It’s time to go ketogenic. Or you’re just not keto-adapted yet. Or you’re sneaking carbs.

2. You think it’s possible to eat unlimited calories on your diet and not get fat. Eat all of the butter and lard you want. You can’t store fat if you don’t spike your insulin!

3. You think your diet is “the natural human diet” or “the one true way.” As Fitzgerald explains, there is no “the” human diet. Indigenous diets varied wildly, but there were some overlaps. All included cooked foods, all included a mixture of plant and animal foods, and whenever a diet was heavily skewed in favor of one macronutrient, it seems to have been carbohydrates more commonly than fat or protein.

4. Your diet requires you to supplement. Nutritional supplements were not even around until the mid 1900s, so say you’re a vegan who has to supplement B12 simply to survive. That should really tell you something about how unnatural your diet is. Amazingly, some vegans will reconcile their supplementation with their belief that humans are natural herbivores, saying for example that in the olden days, people used to get B12 from “dirty” produce, and B12 deficiency is simply a result of sterile, modern fruits and vegetables.

5. You see people who don’t follow your diet as being "not merely in error, but in sin.” For example, a vegetarian will commonly see meat eaters as evil. It is true the factory farming system is highly unethical, but vegetarian hatred of meat eaters extends beyond that, because vegetarians will irrationally attack people such as Joel Salatin who produce meat in an ethically and environmentally responsible manner.

38 people found this helpful

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blaine

A well written book with advice that could literally kill people

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 4, 2014

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I was looking forward to reading Diet Cults because there is a giant need for such a book. Unfortunately, Diet Cults isn't it.

Matt makes the same mistakes over and over that he criticizes other diet "guru" authors for: namely, letting their own bias influence their writings.

The saddest part of this book is that it is well written and there is a lot to agree with. However, there are blind spots in Diet Cults that you can drive a truck through. So let's get started.

First, Matt is an extreme endurance athlete who works with professional extreme endurance athletes. Matt reports he is 6'1", weighs less than 160 pounds and exercises 90 minutes every day! Judging from his pictures on the internet and obsession for maintaining lean racing body weight, a good guess is he has 6 to 8% body fat.

Matt doesn't seem to understand that he is not as normal as the subtitle of his book suggests, "The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide to Healthy Eating for the Rest of Us." Just who exactly is he including in, "the Rest of Us?"

If by the rest of us, he means extreme endurance athletes, who are under 50 years old, not prone to injury, obesity, diabetes or heart disease, then this book may be for them. However, if you are not in Matt's exclusive group, beware, because some of his diet recommendations are not only misguided, they could actually be dangerous.

While Matt does a good job of making the case that there is not, "One True Way" of eating, he saves most of his disdain and criticism for Professor Loren Cordain (founder of the Paleo diet) and Dr. Tim Noakes, author of Lore of Running and one of the leading exercise physiologists in the world. Both men are lifelong successful runners who advocate a natural whole foods diet and abstinence of processed foods
.
The irony of Matt's criticism of these two men is that Matt makes the case for the Paleo diet with his own, "Diet Quality Hierarchy," which lists ten categories of foods in decreasing order of quality. Matt's idea is to eat more foods from the top categories and less from the bottom.

* Vegetables
* Fruits
* Nuts, seeds, and healthy oils
* High-quality meat and seafood
* Whole grains
* Dairy
* Refined grains
* Low-quality meat and seafood
* Sweets
* Fried foods

How is it possible for Mat to criticize the Paleo Diet when the Paleo Diet says you should eat from the top four categories on Matt's list for most of your calories and avoid processed foods whenever possible? It is nonsensical for Matt to call Paleo a fad diet.

In effect, Matt's major criticism is that by his own standards, Paleo is clearly better than the diet he eats himself and recommends at the end of his book... unless you think eating boxed cereal, whole wheat bagels and orange juice six days a week (Matt's diet) is somehow superior to eating as Dr.Tim Noakes would say, "natural whole food that is recently dead."

Matt clearly gets away with eating Grape Nuts, Life Cereal, bagels with cream cheese and drinking orange juice almost every morning because at the present time, his body is able to process this sub optimal food. When you are under 50, under 10% body fat and exercise 90 minutes every day, it may be possible to get away with eating crap, just like Michael Phelps who reportedly ate whole Pizzas. But not everyone can eat like Matt and Michael Phelps, (even Michael Phelps admits he can no longer eat like Michael Phelps).

Dr. Tim Noakes followed the high carb diet Matt recommends for years. Noakes ran over 70 marathons and developed type 2 diabetes from Matt's high carb diet. Now Noakes has gone to the other extreme and is recommending a high fat, low carb diet which may work for an extreme endurance sport but has many aspects that may be just as bad as Matt's diet.

If you don't exercise vigorously 90 minutes every day and are one of the 100 million people in America that is diabetic or prediabetic, Grape-Nuts and orange juice may be the single worst things you can eat in the morning, except maybe that whole wheat bagel or heaping bowl of Life Cereal that Matt eats when he is not eating Grape-Nuts.

Let's break it down. One half cup of Grape Nuts has 210 calories, 47 carbs and 5 sugars. But absolutely no one eats just a half cup. Measure it yourself and you won't believe how puny a half cup of Grape-Nuts is. So let's be reasonable and say it's a whole cup with four ounces of blueberries, eight ounces of orange juice and a cup of milk. This breakfast totals, 710 calories, 137 carbs, 50 sugars and is 24% of the calories Matt says he eats every day.

Matt's breakfast is a carbohydrate, sugar bomb that will explode the pancreas of a carb sensitive person. The entire breakfast is almost instantly metabolized as sugar. Grape-Nuts has four ingredients: highly refined whole wheat flour, malted barley, salt and yeast. It doesn't sound too terrible until you realize that malted barley is barley that has been soaked to turn its starch into sugar and then when it is combined with finely processed wheat flour and baked at high temperature, the result is a pure sugar cereal that is instantly metabolized and almost immediately spikes blood glucose levels. The other cereal Matt likes is Life Cereal where the second ingredient by volume is refined sugar. Nuf said.

Matt does do some things right. He avoids fast food, soft drinks and too many deserts... although he should know that orange juice, ounce for ounce, is only slightly better than drinking Coca-cola for breakfast. Eat the whole fruit instead.

Being an extreme endurance athlete is not a get out of jail free card. Matt Fitzgerald owes Loren Cordain, Tim Noakes and the people who bought this book an apology.

On a personal note, I'm 6'1", weigh 160 pounds and exercise 45 minutes every day. To avoid injury, I limit my running to two 25 minute HIIT sessions a week. The rest of the time is spent on a bike, lifting heavy weights and stretching. Just like Dr. Noakes, I too developed type 2 diabetes and was able to reverse it when I gave up Matt's diet and went mostly Paleo, avoiding all processed foods, most grains, liquid dairy and eating almost exclusively from the top 4 categories on Matt's list of diet quality hierarchy.

Matt's a lot like Mikey of Life Cereal fame, he will eat anything. Skip this book and read instead, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. It's the book with a piece of toast on the cover just like the design Matt's publisher ripped off for the cover of this book.

Classic You Tube Video of Mikey:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34wJt3pRY0w&feature=kp

59 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Mr. Andrew S. Wright

Interesting, well-researched, but preaching to the converted

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 2, 2018

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This is an interesting and well-written book. Essentially, it takes many of the established current diet trends and discusses their efficacy. However, you probably don't come to this book without knowing a lot of this information already: it's a 'meta-diet' book - not telling you how to be healthy and maximise nutrition (apart from a little at the end, which doesn't come as any kind of surprise), but explaining why diets work or don't work.

I took a star off because I would have liked further information on meat and dairy free diets and whether Fitzgerald feels these are nutritionally greater or lesser than their dairy and meat alternatives. But, I enjoyed it, I was interested by the premise and Fitzgerald is writer I've read before and would read again.

One person found this helpful

LB

interesting and useful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 24, 2014

Verified Purchase

I found this book compelling reading. A lifelong obsession with finding the perfect diet and yo-yo ing on the scales, has left me in the position of knowing that "diets" don't work. I have been trying to find a simple healthy way of living but not quite knowing if I am doing the right thing and struggling to make sense of all the information in the media and literature.
This book has helped me to clarify and organise all those thoughts and has provided factual reinforcement for the way I feel about diets and how I want to construct my nutritional framework. It has been like turning on the light and realising you made it to the right place in the dark!
In the main the book is a summary of why all the popular diets have flaws. It is not a recipe book, nor is it a new diet to follow. But, at the end of the book, Mr Fitzgerald provides the best model I have personally ever seen for assessing your eating habits and highlighting areas in which you could make healthier choices.
If you are looking for someone to tell you what to eat and when , this book is not for you.
My opinion is that for anyone who is motivated to improve their nutrition and move towards a healthier lifestyle, this non prescriptive monitoring system may be just what they need to help them achieve that goal.

14 people found this helpful

Jdu

Insightful and scientific - about time!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 26, 2016

Verified Purchase

A thoroughly interesting read for everyone. I feel everyone should read this book to get some perspective on food, backed entirely with scientific evidence. Not at any point does the author tell you how you should or should not eat. Instead, he introduces the world of research and science to the reader to emphasise why the reasonings behind certain diets are total nonsense. A refreshing change from hearing dieters give their opinion as law! Loved it.

Amazon Customer

A good starting point for healthy eating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 6, 2018

Verified Purchase

Apart from the practical benefits of offering easy to follow guidelines to healthy eating at the end of the book, Matt brings a lot of interesting information about food from a historical, cultural and biological point of view. He debunks a lot of diet prejudices and misconceptions in a very simple yet scientific way, writing in a very down-to-earth prose.

One person found this helpful

Ms. E. Robertson

Waste of money!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 16, 2017

Verified Purchase

What a disappointment. Having throroughly enjoyed Matt's running-related books and found them educational, I was excited about reading this. However, I found it poorly written, all over the place and lacking structure. There was an awful lot of waffling and I can honestly say I learnt absolutely nothing from it. Lots of speculating without firm conclusions.

One person found this helpful

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