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Protein Power- by Michael R. Eades, M.D. and Mary Dan Eades, M.D.
Review by Levi Wallach, October, 2000.
Several weeks ago I decided to go on the Atkins diet, which I had previously looked down on as a gimmicky, though interesting philosophy. That opinion was based mainly on a combination of reading one of Atkins' books, Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, but also hearing Atkins talk on at least one NPR talk show. In the process of looking on the web for forums about the diet, I came across recommendations for other low-carbohydrate diet books, including Protein Power. I decided to pick up Protein Power after only a week after being on the Atkins diet.
All I can say is that Protein Power is worlds better than Atkins' book! It is reasoned, detailed, very well organized, and extremely interesting. Compare this to Atkins' ranting tone, excessive repetition, hype and self-promotion. No wonder so many people have such a negative impression about low-carb diets - their most vocal spokesperson is a big cheese-ball!
Ok, enough trashing of Atkins, and onto Protein Power. As I mentioned, the book is very well organized. It goes into a vast array of areas, covering diet, exercise, supplements, anthropology, physiology, and more. Each chapter has a great synopsis at the end, in case you want to go back and get the general gist, or just don't have enough interest to read through 30 pages about a topic.
The main point of the book is to illustrate how a low-carbohydrate diet is much healthier for people than one that's high in carbohydrate and low in protein. The Eades list many studies and anthropological data that show how prehistoric man ate (mainly animal proteins and fat plus minimal amounts of berries, shoots, and seeds), is still what our modern bodies are designed for. Switching to a diet that is similar to this will, according to them, lower your cholesterol and triglicerides, aid in weight-loss, and generally alleviate many medical problems including diabetes, chronic fatigue, heart disease, hypertension, rashes, asthma, and a score of others.
How does it do this? To summarize the theory, carbohydrates are basically the same thing as sugar. They are simply sugars molecules that are chained together and your body breaks them into simple sugars with little effort or energy expended once they are consumed. This being the case, most people eat the equivelent of several cups of sugar per day! No one would agree that this is healthy, but yet the prevailing dogma from the authorities of the AMA, AHA, etc., is that the most healthy diet is extremely low fat and high-carb with little protein as well. In any case, the main health problems that the Eades suggest could be eliminated or greatly alleviated by changing to their diet involve how the body reacts to the intake of carbohydrates and sugars. The main hormones involved are insulin and glucagon. When lots of carbs and/or sugars are ingested, there's a big increase in insulin, a hormone whose job it is to decreases that excess sugar in the blood stream. The problem is that over many years of abuse, the insulin loses its effectiveness so your body has to produce more and more of it - a condition called hyperinsulinism. Unfortunately excess amounts of insulin in the blood and tissues causes all kinds of horrible things to go wrong in your body, including decreased immune system, hardening of the arteries, and so forth. Eventually, if taken to an extreme, the insulin becomes completely useless, leading to Adult Onset Diabetes (Diabetes Type II).
According to the Eades, decreasing your carb intake considerably reverses all of this damage. Your insulin becomes more effective and thus not needed as much, so you produce less of it and the ill effects begin to diminish. The other part of this is that by decreasing your carb/sugar intake, your body can no longer use these vast amounts in the diet for energy, so must use the fat on your body, thus making you leaner.
So what exactly do they recommend you eat? Well, first off, you can eat any kind of meat, poultry, or fish, eggs, cheese, nuts, and most vegetables (though you have to limit your intake of cheese, nuts and vegetables because they all contain some carbs). They emphasize the importance of eating your minimum protein requirements for the day, and give you worksheets on how to figure this out for yourself. They do note that smaller people who are trying to lose weight should limit their intake of fat, leaning towards leaner meats, less hard cheeses, fewer egg yolks, etc., since fat is high in calories and excessive amounts of calories without a means to burn them will just allow the body to use your dietary fat as energy instead of the fat stored on your body. They have an initial plan (called "Phase I"), for those who need to lose a lot of weight, which consists of only 20-30 grams of carbs per day. Once you've gotten fairly close to your weight goal (or if didn't have a lot to lose in the first place) you can be on "Phase II" which is 55 grams of carbs per day. When you finally do get to your goal weight, you go on maintenance, which is even more carbs per day. There's further detail of things to stay away from - trans fats (like margarine or anything that has "partially hydrogenated" on the label), certain types of oils that contain a lot of Omega 6 oils (as opposed to the healthier Omega 3 oils found primarily in fish), etc. But the main focus is on keeping carbs low and protein adequate (they repeat throughout the book that low-carb diets such as theirs are unfairly labeled "high-protein" when they are simply fulfilling the necessary requirement of protein for the body and not much more.
Aside from diet, the Eades also talk about exercise and supplements. For exercise, they suggest resistance training (weight-lifting) as it increases lean muscle mass, which requires more energy just to sit still then fat does, thus inherently raising your metabolism. They also have a fascinating section on human growth hormone, in relation to both diet and exercise. They suggest that the amount of HGH that you produce goes down over time, but not by much, the main issue is in how receptive your body is to it and the main ways to increase this receptiveness is through diet, but also through resistance training. The chapter on supplements is very informative, going through the main vitamins and minerals and how important they are for various functions of the body. The chapter ends with an extremely helpful rundown on their recommendations for how much of each vitamin and mineral you should have during the day and even recommend several multivitamin/mineral brands that fit the bill. They suggest that getting these from foods are preferable, but most of the time impractical, especially on a low-carb diet. In addition to the main theme, the Eades talk about various other health and diet related issues. For example, they talk about cholesterol. They try to dispel what they call the anti-cholesterol hysteria that has enveloped in the U.S. by talking about how we actually could not live without it. The body creates its own cholesterol and only 20% of the cholesterol in your body is from dietary cholesterol - the rest is from what your body creates itself.
Another topic is eicosinoids, a little-known set of compounds produced by your body which effect the skin, hair, nails, lungs, and other parts that are effected by dilation levels of blood vessels and bronchia. Aspirin, in addition to other drugs, is an eicoisinoid-blocker. Unfortunately, it blocks both good and bad eicosinoids and so always has both good and bad effects - pain relief for headaches, but stomach irritation, for example.
The Eades tie in their low-carb diet into many of these things explaining that it is the only way to change certain the levels of the bad hormones or compounds in the body. They explain exactly how the diet goes about producing these chemical, physiological effects, and they also relate many examples from years of personal practice where they've used the diet to produce impressive results in their patients.
There's some fascinating information about how some of the earliest recorded people of civilization, ancient Egyptians, had the same diseases (obesity, heart disease, arthereosclerosis, .etc) as modern man, despite eating a diet of mostly grains and vegetables, with minimal amounts of protein and fat. The remains of prehistoric man, on the other hand, indicate they were taller, lived much longer, and did not suffer from the dental decay or crumbling bones of the Egyptians. They tie this into the label that critics have given the recent swell of interest in low-carb diets as being "fad" diets. However, the Eades point out, the high-carb diet of civilized man who has developed agricultural products is the real fad, seeing as it's existed only for about 10,000 years, whereas up until that point man (and his ancestors) lived on the exact low-carb diet that they are advocating.
About the only negative I found with the book, was not a negative for me, but I realize that it could be for some - the book can get into a fair level of technical detail about some things. I thought it was interesting learning about all the complex processes that go on in the blood, your cells, etc., all the different enzymes and compounds involved, but unless you're intimately familiar with this stuff (being a scientist or doctor of some sort), you probably won't remember much of the detail anyway, and for those who do not have a technical nature, it may be more confusing than helpful.
Whatever you believe about Atkins, or low-carb diets in general, I would urge anyone interested in health, diet, and nutrition to read this book. Do not let your distaste of Atkins to leave you close-minded about the TYPE of diet he recommends, rather read something from doctors who are objective about their theories and aren't trying to sell you a range of products.
How am I doing on the diet? Well, so far I've only lost 5 lbs., but I've been lifting weights for the past couple of weeks (something that Eades recommend), so I'm convinced that some of the fat that I would have been losing which isn't showing up on the scale is actually gaining of muscle. But just as importantly on this diet my energy level is very high and I am rarely hungry or craving anything. I can only speak of course from my own experience. Different people have completely different experiences on the same diet. But if you do decide to try it out, I would recommend trying to stay on it for at least three or four weeks before deciding to go off or stay on. The reason for this is that many people have an initially negative experience because your body has to adapt to a new way of getting its fuel. Usually these symptoms (such as energy loss) tend to go away after a week or so, but sometimes may take up to two weeks or a little more. The reason I did this in the first place was that for the past 9 or 10 months, other than a few weeks slip, I had been very consistent about keeping a very low-fat diet that also happened to be low in protein, and high in carbs. I also exercised religiously, going on average five times per week to the gym, and using the cardiovascular machines to do workouts that lasted over an hour and burned 600+ calories. After losing around 20 lbs in the first two or three months of the diet, my body simply would not give up any more weight no matter how good I was. So I thought I would try something new. So far everything's going well, and from the discussion boards I've frequented, people don't seem to be having the same problems with seesawing or stalling that are very commonly expressed on discussion forums for low-fat/high-carb diets.
In the end, everyone needs to and will draw his or her own conclusions. I just hope that people avoid the propensity to feel that they are on the "only right diet" and anything else is the "wrong diet" and thus a horrible, unhealthy thing. Even if you've tried all the different dieting philosophies personally, everyone is different and what works for one person may not work for another. So I don't think low-carb diets are THE answer for everyone, but for the moment, this particular diet seems to be working for me. Your mileage may vary.
