Joel Fuhrman is a nutritarian and he has a series of books revolving around juicing and ingesting as many nutrient dense foods as possible (fruit, nuts and vegetables) for their health benefits whilst laying off meat and animal products. Claiming that people that follow his diet can put their organs in to nutrient overload, with the ability to lose weight and even cure type 2 diabetes because the pancreas gets so many nutrients it starts working again.
I’m going to have to give this book 0 stars based on my understanding of science and personal experience.
Juicing and making soups from vegetables can give you a new way of taking in more nutrients, true, and this is definitely a good thing. This can also ‘help’ you lose weight as you’re essentially on a calorie restricted diet, also true. You also can feel good whilst doing it, for a time, because you’re filling your body with natural sugars giving you a non stop sugar high, bad. Due to the calorie, fat and protein restriction, as you lose weight your body will also catabolise muscle to feed itself, very bad.
If type 2 diabetes was caused by a vitamin deficiency, which is essentially what this book is suggesting, there would be some scientific studies backing it up and possibly a recommendation on which vitamins you’d be deficient in. Instead it’s just juice all the things and stop eating meat. There’s no real scientific basis for it, no hypothesis, test, results, conclusion, summary. No evidence, no proof.
For type 2s he says a 50% reduction in medication in the first week then you can be off your meds after 3-6 months. I know of people who have been doing this diet for years and have seen no such results.
The diet I chose, after careful research of many scientific studies, a high fat, medium protein, low carb diet, got me off my medication completely within 3 days of starting it. I’ve also lost 4kg of fat (not muscle) in 4 weeks since I started it. I also feel totally awesome.
This book represents the polar opposite of that diet.
