Dr. Barnard's 5 Diet Pitfalls

By the looks of the comments, or lack thereof, on his blog post I'm going to say Dr. Neal Barnard doesn't have a big following, at least not among readers of The Huffington Post:

Avoid These Five New Year's Resolution Mistakes

That's unfortunate because the guts of his message constitute a ray of sense among the blinding inanity of many weight loss schemes. As evidence: Female Chinese Students Resort To Eating Roundworm Eggs To Ensure They Look Thin For Job Interviews.

Here are his 5 mistakes:

1. Exercise instead of changing what you eat to lose weight.
   
2. Count calories.
   
3. Avoid carbs.
   
4. Avoid sugar. (Kind of like #3, isn't it.)
   
5. Focus on the long-term.

Which, if you avoid them, lead to these 5 bits of advice:

1. To lose weight, change your diet. "Exercise is not likely to do much for your waistline unless you also change your eating habits."
   
2. Concentrate on foods, not numbers. "Let foods do the work for you."
   
3. Choose healthy carbs.
   
4. Sugar, per se, is not the problem. "The real problem with sugar is that it lures us in to cookies, cakes, candy bars and doughnuts," that are prepared with lots of fat.
   
5. Focus on right now - the next meal, the next weeks' meals.

I'm not on board with a few of Barnard's finer points. But I'll give him the overall argument: eating a minimally-processed, low-fat, plant-based diet is a great avenue to good health.

Here's Dr. Barnard talking about diabetes:


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