Kevin Brown
Sadiqua Hamdan
Annette Presley
Debbie Wysocki
Paul Ericson
Maureen Diaz
Janet Demeter
Liz Reitzig
Julie Burns
Jenny Westerkamp, RD
Lauren Snyder Grosz
Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, CCN
let'spoon
Morley Robbins
Janet Stuck, ND, CNC, MH, CNHP
John Chisholm
Dr. Richard Walicki
Jimmy Moore
Summertime 2010 Book Review Series:
The Liberation Diet By Kevin Brown and Annette Presley
People these days feel trapped by the obvious failure of conventional wisdom when it comes to their diet and health. They have faithfully followed everything they’ve been told is good for them down to the last bit of whole grain bread and tofu burgers that are most commonly associated with the standard low-fat, high-carb, plant-based dietary recommendations but they still inexplicably deal with obesity and chronic disease like never before! What the heck is going on here? Its one thing to fool around with your personal fitness and nutrition where you are expected to gain weight and have unhealthy blood sugars, lipids and the like. But what can explain these things happening when you’re supposedly doing everything 100% right?
That’s the answer that personal trainer Kevin Brown and registered dietitian Annette Presley answer for readers in their counterintuitive book called
The Liberation Diet: Setting America Free from the Bondage of Health Misinformation!.
Brown and Presley do an outstanding job of explaining the breakdown that is happening with nutrition in the 21st Century. They correctly identify whats wrong with a one-size-fits-all approach to promoting the same diet to
everyone without taking into account the specific individualized factors that make one way of eating better than another for certain people. Challenging this conventional wisdom on nutrition is what you get early and often from The Liberation Diet and the authors d
on’t hold back in blasting away at the nonsense that pervades from the so-called health experts and government policymakers responsible for perpetrating these lies on the unsuspecting public. The stories behind how foods like Crisco came into being are truly fascinating and should make you shudder about what the food industry is feeding Americans that we DON’T yet know about. We learn that clever marketing and a little sleight of hand is all it takes to convince people to start eating something their great-grandparents would have never even entertained a thought about eating. From margarine to Cool Whip to Wonder Bread, we’re surrounded by so many fake foods that the message this book implores on the reader is to simply get back to eating real, whole foods again. Duh!
As you turn page after page of The Liberation Diet, you’ll no doubt find yourself becoming angrier and angrier by all the preponderance of the evidence presented that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that we have been
lied to about what constitutes a healthy diet. And even more egregious is the story you’ll read about entrepreneurs Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller who were the ones who set up the accreditation process for medical schools. Because they saw the potential for billions of dollars in profits from pharmaceutical sales, the only schools that would be accredited were ones that taught students about how to prescribe expensive drugs to their patients rather than having them learn about the equally effective nutritional therapies. Unfortunately, this model for teaching medical school students still exists today while millions of people in the United States are needlessly suffering from mostly preventable diseases related their diet. You may need to start breathing deeply or take a walk in between chapters to get your blood pressure down again because this information will have you up in arms!
Brown and Presley also point readers back to the infamous Seven Countries study by Ancel Keys that has become the standard-bearer for the low-fat diet quagmire that is surprisingly still in existence today despite the fact there have never been any scientific studies published proving it is effective for weight loss or improving health. In fact, there is ample evidence that the diet has been a dismal failure for people with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases of modern man. But rather than admitting they’ve been wrong all these years, the purveyors of the high-carb, low-fat diet keep touting it as the gospel truth while tens of millions more are getting sick and dying from the biggest health scam in the history of the world. And the politicians on Capitol Hill are partially to blame for this as well.
Senator George McGovern and his committee on nutrition in the mid-1970′s were the ones who created all the mass hysteria and fear-mongering about saturated fat when they promoted the now-infamous Dietary Goals for Americans that was later picked up by the United States Department of Agriculture to help them promote the sale of more key crops like grains, corn and bean (which just so happen to be very high in carbohydrate). The authors write in their book, They liked the idea of a low-fat diet because if people cut the 
fat from their diets, they would have to add carbohydrates. Again, this is still the overriding theme of the USDA Dietary Guidelines released every five years in the United States with seemingly no dramatic changes each time new recommendations are released. This is why The Liberation Diet book was written and so sorely needed in modern-day society. Its time for public revolt against the status quo!
So if everything is so grim and bleak, do we have any hope at all? You bet we do! Its called THE TRUTH and you get a lot of it within the pages of this book. Learn why saturated fat and cholesterol are not the reasons why we have heart disease, how eating butter, lard, and coconut oil are actually good for you, why high cholesterol foods like eggs are healthy, why consuming real whole (raw) milk is optimal for your health, and why the highly processed hydrogenated fats (trans fats) and vegetable oils are the real villains in our diet along with sugar and excessive consumption of carbohydrate. And there are some real doozy stories you’ll read about how common carbohydrate foods consumed by most Americans like cereal actually came into existence. You’ll never believe it until you read about it. This book is peppered with ample evidence that should convince you that eating carbs will make you fat, diseased, and eventually dead from some preventable chronic health problems that nobody is talking about. You’ll learn that there is absolutely zero science supporting a high-carb diet and that livin la vida low-carb is NOT the fad diet it has been made out to be by the anti-low-carb members of the health media.
Other topics of interest covered in this book include calories in, calories out, salt, water, exercise, supplements, and more! Real-life examples of how people have changed their lives by implementing the strategies of The Liberation Diet are also included to encourage you as you take this newfound journey for yourself. Of course, you also get lots of recipes, references and other resources to help you along as you improve your lifestyle for good. Having interviewed both Kevin Brown and Annette Presley for my health-based podcast, I can personally attest that they are the real deal when it comes to articulating information that will help you in your personal weight and health goals. If you’ve been frustrated and felt trapped by the low-fat lie that’s been heavily promoted for far too long, then why not give the concepts outlined in this book a try for yourself? It could be the answer you’ve been looking for all along.
Jimmy Moore author of LivinLaVida Lo-Carb
Kevin Brown is President of Liberation Wellness and co-author of the Liberation Diet. He serves as a Fellow on the National Board of Fitness Examiners, and is president of Visionary Trainers. Kevin and his wife Tracy are Chapter leaders for the Weston A. Price foundation, a non-profit organization that is helping restore real food to its rightful place in the American diet.
This is the latest on my attempt to start a dairy coop, for raw milk of course, in California. I’ll preface it by saying that Organic Pastures is a fine dairy and we’re fortunate to have such a raw milk advocate and fighter in Mark McAfee. It’s stunning to see what’s happened just in the last few months in California concerning raw milk.
