nicoles blog APRIL 09
Crazy diets of nutty people
I was so inflamed by an article I read in my Saturday newspaper (The Good Weekend) that I emailed the editor. She thought it was worth sharing because my email was published as ‘letter of the week’ in a subsequent issue. Let me tell you a little bit about the article, and then you can read my letter in context.
Called, ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner’, the article featured three people following three unconventional diets in order to live longer and prevent disease. The first subject was a guy who followed the ‘Primal diet’. This guy eats a kilogram of raw meat and 10 raw eggs daily with sides of raw butter and bone marrow, and snacks on green vegetable juice and a litre of raw (unpasteurised) milk His wife and six year old daughter also follow the diet.
Subject two was a woman claiming to be a ‘fruitarian’, and says she only eats fruit (all raw). She has raised her two children on the same diet. Added to this she eats only one fruit for long periods of time (called mono-dieting), including six months on nothing but melon. Her son by the age of 14 had decided to stray from the path and eat normal cooked food.
The third subject was positively conventional by comparison: a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner whose diet is primarily aimed at cancer prevention. He eats mostly rice,10% meat, fruit, lots of vegetables (all cooked), fresh and dried herbs, soy milk instead of dairy, and green tea. He uses the Chinese principles of balancing acid and alkali, and hot and cold foods, and eats apricot kernels in the belief they fight cancer (which contain cyanide and are potentially dangerous).
So now my letter…
In the midst of a global food crisis in which 24,000 people die from hunger every day, the Primal and Fruitarian diet followers in your article, Guess who’s coming to dinner (February 21), seem pathetically misguided. To think they know better than the overwhelming majority of real nutrition experts is arrogant, but to deprive their children of a balanced diet and normal social eating opportunities is tantamount to neglect. This kind of dietary separatism just looks like self-obsession – an obscene indulgence in a hungry world.
