The Truth About the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet

The Truth About the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet

This is another diet that is designed with the goal of allowing the dieter to reach a healthy weight as well as take measures to improve their odds of living a long, happy, and healthy life. This diet plan was designed by the presiding member of the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine, Doctor Neil Barnard. The diet purports to accomplish this goal by releasing the power of the foods that you choose to eat so that you enhance your health and slow down the process of aging.

Unlike the Zone Diet, this diet is completely vegetarian, and involves a very limited consumption of fat. Barnard believes that this diet can powerfully impact longevity, because it balances hormones, enhances the immune system, filters the blood, and limits the impact of disease on the cells.

Eat Right, Live Longer Diet Overview

The Eat Right, Live Longer Diet is designed to keep the body healthy at the cellular level, improve hormone balance and strengthen the immune system with the help of a vegetarian diet low in fat.

The diet revolves around the consumption of organic foods with the goal of avoiding pesticides and other contaminants.

Barnard's diet also involves raw vegetables and fruits, because they provide antioxidants and nutrients more effectively than cooked alternatives.

Who Should Try the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet?

This diet could be effective for individuals that are vegetarian or would be interested in adopting a vegetarian lifestyle. This diet is also for people that enjoy cooking and preparing foods, and have the time to do so, because there is little room for convenience foods within the specifications of this diet.

Who Should Avoid the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet?

If you aren't interested in vegetarianism, this diet is not right for you. If you like meat and dairy products and can't imagine a life without them, go ahead and stop reading here. Also, because this diet requires a lot of prep and home cooking, people that require meal flexibility will have a lot of trouble making this diet work.

The Idea Behind the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet

This diet does not emphasize weight loss, but with considerate adaptations and considerations, this diet could easily be an effective weight loss plan. In the book devoted to the diet, there is only a single chapter discussing how the diet can potentially pertain to weight loss.

In spite of the fact that the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet is not designed exclusively as a diet for losing weight, the author explains that a vegetarian lifestyle can be an incredibly effective means to lose weight, with only a few important precautions. He believes that if you simply follow the recommendations of his diet, you'll never really have to “diet” because you will be eating responsible meals every day.

The Specifics of the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet

Barnard's diet plan is not explicitly about losing weight, but making efforts to preserve optimal health. His primary argument for avoiding diary products and meats is that they are packed with drugs, hormones, and chemicals which can negatively impact our immune systems and even make us ill.

Unlike the Zone Diet, this diet involves high consumption of carbohydrates as a means to lose weight, citing research that contends that carbohydrate calories are inefficiently turned into fat by the digestive system, and that they actually take more energy to burn than fat calories.

Another reason he supports a high-carbohydrate diet is because there is evidence that shows that after a person eats a high-carb meal, they emit higher levels of body heat, which supports the hypothesis that these sorts of carbs burn calories more quickly. He goes so far as to say that high-carb foods can actually burn more calories than they produce under some circumstances.

He claims that following this diet can have a strong influence on hormone balance, and can help overweight people lose weight and improve their health overall. This diet claims to improve hormone balance by preventing hormone levels from spiking. Barnard explains that eating excessive fat causes hormone levels to increase, while consuming fiber has the ability to balance hormones.

Nutrition Plan of the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet

The book associated with this diet plan includes one hundred pages of individual recipes, as well as fourteen days of unique meal menus made up of those recipes. Barnard also includes tips on how to shop in order to achieve success with this diet, and also explains how to get your kitchen ready for vegetarian cooking that involves very little fat.

The typical Eat Right, Live Longer Daily Menu looks a lot different than the Zone Diet. An Example of an Eat Right Breakfast would be fruit preserves, applesauce muffins, and an apricot smoothie. Lunch would be something like fruit salad, spinach salad, potatoes, and lentil soup. Dinner would be the meal that looked most different: Dinner may include garlic bread, tomato and broccoli pasta, salad with no-fat dressing, and fresh apricot crisps. Barnard emphasizes constantly that in order for this diet to be most successful, it is vitally important that no dairy or meat products ever be consumed.

There are many reasons why Dr. Barnard recommends raw vegetables and fruits, but one big reason is that these sorts of raw foods drastically increase the synthesis of a compound known as Gluthathione. Gluthathione is a powerful antioxidant which has the ability to take damaging free radicals and other potentially toxic compounds and ship them out of the body. While the Eat Right diet does caution against the intake of excess sugars, it does not emphasize the potential importance of glycemic index as a lot of other diets do.

Expert Opinion of the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet

Most nutrition experts believe that the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet is indeed a healthy diet, if you have the power to maintain it. It's not necessarily a problem inherent with the diet, but most people would probably find the diet hard to follow because they are not willing to commit to a purely vegetarian diet.

With regard to health concerns, there are two primary issues for people over the age of fifty that are interested in the diet. The first issue is that the diet lacks both Vitamin D and B12, as well as calcium. The diet plan does explain how to add Vitamin B12 in the diet, but does not do a good job of explaining how to get the Vitamin D and Calcium needed for a healthy and balanced diet. Of course, one could add multivitamins and other supplements to take care of these dietary needs.

Barnard contends that if you follow his diet appropriately, you can get by with less calcium in the diet because you are eating less protein. Protein consumption has a negative impact on calcium retention, which necessitates an enhanced need for Calcium. He also explains that if you get enough sunlight every day, you won't need Vitamin D from the diet. The problem with this is that after the age of fifty or so, your body will start to produce its own Vitamin D less effectively.

If you are interested in losing weight and balancing your hormones, this is a very strong vegetarian diet. If you do exactly as the diet says, you will likely lose weight. The diet will also produce a number of health benefits which should greatly decrease your mortality risk as well. This diet will likely reduce your risk of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and even probably some types of cancer. The issue is simply a matter of your own personal commitment to the diet and your ability to spend the extra money necessary to live by an organic diet.

The main way that we would suggest that you supplement the diet would to make sure that you take a multivitamin that has a full daily value of both Vitamin D and B12, as well as one gram of calcium.

Calorie Requirements of this Diet

Although this diet does not go into explicit detail regarding how to lose weight,their rule of thumb for your calorie consumption is that you should aim for ten calories for every pound that you want to weigh. So if you weigh 200 pounds and want to weigh 165, you shouldn't eat fewer than 1,650 calories per day. This is the only suggestion that the author makes with regard to your caloric consumption.

Final Thoughts on the Eat Right, Live Longer Diet

Since this diet does not include high levels of protein and is very low in fat, you will easily be able to lose weight if you want to. Most of the foods suggested, outside of carbohydrates, are very nutrient dense while not adding too many calories. Remember, however, that vegetarianism is not a sure-fire way to lose weight, because many people find that as they adapt to their new lifestyle, they find other ways to tack on unnecessary calories.

Also, if you aren't overly interested or do not have the budget for a purely organic diet, the benefits of an organic diet are not fully vetted, and you will likely experience most of the same benefits if you choose your foods conscientiously, even if they aren't certified organic. Finally, recommendations such as avoiding tap water because of chlorine are not well-founded, but may produce some small, if only modestly significant benefit.

Eat Right, Live Longer Diet Recommendations

Eat lots of whole grains, vegetables, and fruits; source produce organically, drink bottled water

Eat Right, Live Longer Things to Avoid

No dairy products, no meats, no produce that isn't organic, no tap water