The first printing of The Advanced Mediterranean Diet: Lose Weight, Feel Better, Live Longer is sold out. Yay! And many thanks to my readers!
The book is available now from a new printer that also handles distribution, CreateSpace. As always, you can also get the book from Amazon.com.
Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in Americans over 65. Impaired vision precedes blindness. A recent study linked consumption of omega-3 fatty acids with 30% lower risk of developing macular degeneration. Believe me, it’s a lot better to prevent it than try to treat it once present.
[I have a couple older relatives with macular degeneration, so I pay close attention to the scientific literature.]
What’s the best source of omega-3 fatty acids? Our friend, the fish. Especially cold-water fatty fish such as tuna, trout, sardines, herring, mackerel, halibut, and sea bass. A few plants are also decent sources, but our bodies don’t utilize those omega-3 fatty acids as well as they do from fish.
Note that both the Advanced Mediterranean Diet and Ketogenic Mediterranean Diet feature fish.
Reference: SanGiovanni, J.P., et al. Long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid intake and 12-y incidence of neovascular age-related macular degeneration and central geographic atrophy: AREDS report 30, a prospective cohort study from the Age-Related Eye Disease Study. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 90 (2009): 1,601-1,607. First published October 7, 2009. doi:10.3945/ajcn.2009.27594
I googled “mediterranean diet” today and one of my websites—The Advanced Mediterranean Diet—for the first time showed up on the first page of results. It’s usually on page three or four.
It won’t last but it’s a great way to end 2009.
[You know you’ve been wildly successful in business when your company name has turned into a verb: from Google to “I googled…”]
Thanks for your support!
My weight-loss book, The Advanced Mediterranean Diet: Lose Weight, Feel Better, Live Longer, is now available at Barnes and Noble (.com).
You will also find it at Amazon.com and the publisher’s warehouse (Vanguard Press).
Some people like the fact that a book purchased online from Barnes and Noble can be returned for a refund at a local bricks-and-mortar Barnes and Noble. I can’t imagine why anyone would return it!
Price varies, so check around. And don’t overlook the cost of shipping. Vanguard Press is offering free shipping for a limited time.
Steve Parker, M.D.
I love Amazon.com.
I’ve had nothing but great interactions with Amazon.com, both as a business partner and as a customer buying books and music CDs.
Amazon.com is a major seller of my book, The Advanced Mediterranean Diet: Lose Weight, Feel Better, Live Longer.
When Amazon sells all their copies of the book, future sales always drop off significantly until a new shipment of books gets to the warehouse. Who wants to order a book on back-order that may take three to five weeks to arrive?
Just be aware that you can also get the book from the publisher’s website when Amazon is out of stock.
Steve Parker, M.D.
I am pleased and honored to be blogging for the next three months with the merry band of bloggers at NutritionData.com. I’ve been visiting and recommending ND for years.
I will be writing in the NutritionData Heart Health Blog.
My compadres at ND are
[Gee, now I feel like I need more letters after my name!]
Please take time to visit the NutritionData website, or see my review of it here. The site is frequently updated and improved, so my review may be outdated.
I’ll still be posting here at my usual frequency, about twice weekly.
Steve Parker, M.D.
I am pleased to announce that in January of this year I met the accreditation criteria of the Health on the Net Foundation’s Code of Conduct for medical and health Web sites.
From the HON website:
The Health On the Net Foundation (HON) promotes and guides the deployment of useful and reliable online health information, and its appropriate and efficient use. Created in 1995, HON is a non-profit, non-governmental organization, accredited to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. For twelve years, HON has focused on the essential question of the provision of health information to citizens, information that respects ethical standards. To cope with the unprecedented volume of healthcare information available on the Net, the HONcode of conduct offers a multi-stakeholder consensus on standards to protect citizens from misleading health information.
Here are HONcode criteria I pledge to uphold:
If you notice any violations of the code, please contact me via email (see Contact page) or contact the Health on the Net Foundation.
A recent study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association documents one way to change eating habits: exchange lists.
Your basic exhange list is a list of recommended foods, with serving sizes and frequencies. For example, I could give you note recommending you eat three pieces of fruit, four 1-cup servings of vegetables, and two tablespoons of healthy oils daily. Then I give you a list fruits, vegetables, and oils from which to choose. You decide which fruits to eat from the list, just be sure to eat three servings daily. One fruit is as good as the other: they are exchangeable. You check off your intake as you go through the day. People with diabetes have used exchange lists for years.
Researchers with the University of Michigan Health System plan to test a Mediterranean-style diet for breast cancer prevention. Several previous observational studies have associated the Mediterranean diet with lower rates of breast cancer (along with lower rates of colon, uterus, and prostate cancer). The researchers wondered how to get women to change their diet in the direction of a Greek-Mediterranean diet. They devised an exchange list to promote high intake of monounsaturated fats and fruits and vegetables. Would women follow it?
Methodology
Sixty-nine women, ages 25 to 59, were enrolled to either continue their usual diet or to follow a six-month intervention diet designed to:
decrease usual fat intakes by about half and to replace those fats with olive oil and other high–monounsaturated fatty acid foods; increase fruit and vegetable intakes to 7 to 9 servings/day, depending on energy intake; and consume at least one serving per day each of culinary herbs and allium vegetables.
Allium vegetables include onions, leeks, chives, garlic, and shallots.
Dietitians designed a Mediterranean diet exchange list, specified exchange goals, and provided individualized telephone counseling. Counseling was in-person at the start of the study and three months later.
Here’s a quote from the University of Michigan Health System news release:
In this new study, specific suggestions in the exchange list included:
- 8-10 servings (or exchanges) each day of high monounsaturated fatty acid (MUFA), such as olive or hazelnut oil, avocado and macadamia nuts
- Limits on fats that are low in MUFA, such as corn oil, margarine, tahini, pine nuts and sesame seeds.
- One or more servings a day of dark green vegetables, such as broccoli, peas and spinach
- At least one exchange per day of garlic, onions and leeks
- One tablespoon or more per day of green herbs, such as basil, cilantro, peppermint and sage
- One or more servings a day of red vegetables, such as tomatoes, tomato sauce and salsa
- One or more servings a day of yellow or orange vegetables, such as carrots, red bell peppers and pumpkin
- One or more servings a day of other vegetables, such as artichokes, cucumber, green beans and sugar snap peas
- One or more servings a day of vitamin C fruits, such as oranges, mangoes and strawberries
- One or more servings a day of other fruits, such as apples, bananas and grapes
Results
Compared to the non-intervention (control) group, the Mediterranean group:
Researchers’ Conclusions
Results demonstrated that counseling using the Mediterranean exchange list was effective for large dietary changes relative to the nonintervention group.
My Comments
I can’t wait to see the larger prospective study regarding breast cancer reduction with a Greek-Mediterranean diet. But it will take years. And the dietary effects likely are cumulative over years of eating, not just six months. This is a start.
We have seen with weight-loss diets that people typically return to their old ways of eating six to twelve months after making a change. That’s why it’s so difficult to demonstrate irrefutably that one diet is healthier than another. How do you get 10,000 people to make major dietary changes and sustain them for 10-20 years, and another similar group of 10,000 people to make no changes? [After 20 years, you compare the health status of both groups.]
I suppose we could study prisoners serving life terms. Hmmm . . .
Many of us can’t wait 10 or 20 years for study results. We have to make food decisions now, based on the best available data.
My Advanced Mediterranean Diet uses an exchange list system - Daily Logs & and Grocery Shopping List - to approximate the Mediterranean diet. People seem to like the flexibility.
Steve Parker, M.D.
References:
Djuric, Zora, et al. Design of a Mediterranean Exchange List Diet Implemented by Telephone Counseling. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 108 (2008): 2,059-2,065.
University of Michigan Health System news release, “Women double fruit, veggie intake with switch to Mediterranean diet,” December 17, 2008.
In a word . . . Yes.
Would it still be the Mediterranean diet? That’s debatable. We could call it a Vegetarian Mediterranean diet.
The traditional Mediterranean diet is rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, whole grains, fish, olive oil, judicious amounts of wine, with minimal saturated fats. Dairy products are mostly cheese and yogurt. Other characteristics are daily fresh fruits, seasonal locally grown foods with minimal processing, less than four eggs per week, small amounts of red meat, poultry in low to moderate amounts, and concentrated sugars only a few times per week.
There are many varieties of traditional Mediterranean diet, based on proximity to the sea, local climate and soils, regional customs, religious proscriptions, transportation networks, etc. Some cultural subsets in the region have relatively high meat and saturated fat intake.
Overall, however, the traditional Mediterranean diet is much lower in animal-origin foods compared to the standard American diet. It’s plant-based. But it’s not a vegetarian diet.
In the Advanced Mediterranean Diet, I teach readers how to emulate or approximate the Mediterranean diet by recommending specific servings of grains, vegetables, fruits, fats (overwhelmingly plant-derived), milk products, and proteins (animal and plant origin).
A list of the available foods is here (see Grocery Shopping List).
A lacto-ovo vegetarian - who eats milk products and eggs - could easily use the AMD for weight loss, choosing beans, nuts, peanut butter or tofu as proteins (discussed on page 144).
Vegans, who eat no animal-derived foods, are a little harder to accommodate because of the “milk products” category. Cheese and yogurt are time-honored components of the traditional Mediterranean diet, although not typically in large amounts.
The milk products category is also an acknowledgment that calcium and vitamin D, abundant in milk products, may be very helpful in prevention and treatment of osteoporosis. Milk products are also good sources of high quality proteins. Page 168 discusses non-animal substitutes for milk products.
Browsing at Amazon.com yesterday, I ran across a pertinent book, The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen by Donna Klein. Published in 2001, it is still selling well.
PS: Any text in this blog post below this point is unauthorized spam. [I guess spam by definition is unauthorized.] I appreciate your patience as I work to solve the problem.
I listed most of your weight-loss program options in Part 1 of this series. Now it’s time to make a choice. And it’s not easy sorting through all the options.
Straight away, I must tell you that women over 300 pounds (136 kg) and men over 350 pounds (159 kg) rarely have permanent success with self-help methods such as diet books, meal replacement programs, diet pills or supplements, and meal-delivery systems. People at those high weights who have tried and failed multiple different weight-loss methods should seriously consider bariatric surgery.
I respect your intelligence and desire to do your “due diligence” and weigh all your options: diet books, diet pills and supplements, bariatric surgery, meal replacement products (e.g., SlimFast), portion-control meal providers (e.g., NutriSystem), Weight Watchers, fad diets, no-diet diets, “just cutting back,” etc. You have to make the choice; I can’t make it for you. Here are some well-respected sources of advice to review before you choose:
For me personally, the “diet book” option is appealing. Why? Convenience. Low cost. Effectiveness. If I forget or don’t understand something, I can re-read it.
Since I am a diet book author, you may consider me biased in favor of my own book, which is more of a lifestyle modification book than a diet book. If I didn’t think I could do better than the other books on the market, I wouldn’t have bothered to write my own.
So, please consider my Advanced Mediterranean Diet: Lose Weight, Feel Better, Live Longer (2nd Edition). Click here for a description of the book. Click here for customer reviews. You can order the book at the AMD website, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or check it out from your local library.
I’ve also published a free, online, stripped-down version of my healthy lifestyle program: the Do-It-Yourself Mediterranean Diet.
Also free and brand-new for 2010 is my Ketogenic Mediterranean Diet, which is very low-carb. It’s at my Diabetic Mediterranean Diet Blog, but it works as well for non-diabetics as for diabetics. The comprehensive version of Ketogenic Mediterranean Diet is available at Amazon.com and and Barnes and Noble.
(I’m doing everything I can to help you live longer and healthier.)
Whatever your choice, I wish you success and good health in 2010 and beyond!
Updated February 13, 2012
You are currently browsing the archives for the Shameless Self-Promotion category.
Subscribe
 | This site complies to the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information: verify here. |
