WARNING: These are my personal opinions after making a quick perusal of the book. These may not be my final opinions of it once I've actually read the thing.
Dr. McDougall's latest book reached my Kindle today, The Healthiest Diet on the Planet: Why the Foods You Love-Pizza, Pancakes, Potatoes, Pasta, and More-Are the Solution to Preventing Disease and Looking and Feeling Your Best.
I didn't get much chance to look it over yet. I do know that he has said multiple times in the webinars that the bulk of the book is being taken from newsletter articles he's written over the past year or so and are still currently available for free on his website. Those chapters are titled: There are Lies, and Damn Lies, and The Healthiest Diet versus Fad Diets.
The next chapter is Red Light, Green Light: Dr. McDougall's Guide to What We Should and Shouldn't Eat, a.k.a. The McDougall Color Picture Book. Nothing new here - just a few paragraphs explaining how the "book" came about and the same exact photos as on the web.
Chapter 5 is the recipe section: Recipes for the Healthiest Diet on the Planet. Most of these are already in either other books or the recipe sections on the web site. Unfortunately, many of the recipes use things like miso (too salty for many people with heart or blood pressure conditions), tofu, cashews - more calorically dense recipes, similar to those in The Starch Solution that people complained about when that book came out. If you're on the Maximum Weight Loss Plan, very few of these recipes are for you. There are Pancakes and French Toast and breakfast burritos; a bunch of bowl meals and sauces, some that use tofu or peanut butter; soups containing tofu, even tahini; a (3 recipe) section devoted to tofu recipes; bean and pasta salads; a section titled Potato, Rice, Bean and Pasta Dishes, again with a few containing tofu and nuts; next comes the Burger, Wraps and Pizza chapter, followed by the Sauces (Yes, more nuts, tahini and tofu in here, too). The Desserts - agave, nuts, back to Wonderslim Cocoa and frozen apple juice concentrate again. Full color photographs of 19 of the recipes comes next.
After this comes the references, 10% of the book. Nobody can say Dr. McDougall slacks off on this! Another 10% for the index.
Am I happy I bought this book? Well, I'm a completist, and if I didn't buy it now I would have in the future. Will I read it? I'll read until I recognize the article from a newsletter, then skip to the next. Will I make any of the recipes? Maybe one of the few new ones, but I'm trying to lose weight, not gain it, so the majority of the recipes aren't for me or my husband.
I'm happy Dr. McDougall got the offer he couldn't refuse and put this new book out, but, as he warned, there's really nothing new in it that isn't already on his web site, except for a handful of recipes. But if he wasn't offered a boatload of money to do this, unless I see something really extraordinary when I start to really read it, he should have stopped at The Starch Solution and just referred people to his web site's newsletter archives.
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