The book is selling very well at my office. Many patients have been buying multiple copies to give to friends and families. I am gratified to see that people are benefiting from the work I put into writing it.

On May 18th, 2009, I will conduct a small lecture and book signing at the Book Stall in Winnetks, IL. It's at 7pm and you are all invited to attend. I just gave a lecture and book signing at the Wilmette Library which was well attended and well received. They dubbed my lecture "Chinese secrets for health and longevity". Almost all of the audience were seniors. I do not mind, but at that stage of life, most of the damage has already been done. I need to get this info to the youth and middle-aged of America.

I presented to high school seniors this week and taught them about meditation and the need for balance in their lives. I have been approached by a phys ed teacher at a local high school about guest-lecturing for a health class. It will be next year, but I hope it happens. If we can teach people the truth about food and food choices; and impress upon them their importance, then we can help them avoid many problems later in life.

In other exciting news, I have been approached by a local TV station who want to know more about my book. They may feature me as a guest. There have been no formal offers yet, but they did ask to arrange a meeting next week. So hopefully this will be my first of many TV promotional opportunities. I still need to find a PR agent in Chicago.

It's late and I have been working a little too hard, so this post will end here. But not before I tell everyone to go to theasiaindiet.com and acfom,com

There has been another review posted by an internet journalist.

Enjoyable read!,

April 13, 2009

By	Graeme M. Thompson (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

A weight loss book that doesn't offer to change your life in a month? Seriously? In America?

What I liked most about this book is that it takes the long view. The point is to bring your life into balance by changing your lifestyle generally, including diet and attitude. It doesn't offer quick fixes, and Mr. Bussell repeatedly reminds the reader there isn't really any such thing.

Indeed, it's quite possible to read this book as cultural criticism. Why does dairy have so much power in the US? Why do we eat so much meat? Why are we the single culture that loves to ice our drinks?

Money drives much of our culture. There is money to be made in creating problems. Then money is made with promises to fix the problems. Many of the book's better points are made when the author looks at American culture through the lens of Chinese thinking. You don't have to be interested in weight loss to find the conclusions compelling.

Essentially, America is a young nation, and our culture is based on young ideas. We're excited by excess, and we're continually reeling from one new trend to the next, while older countries look on: sometimes in amusement, sometimes in horror.

What does this have to do with why you're fat? The author asks that you give the question some honest thought. Think about the typical commercial for an antacid that promises you can continue to eat fried food because their product blocks the pain signals your body is sending you. Isn't that typically American to be told, "You shouldn't adapt your diet! Why take care of yourself when you can have more french fries!?"

Does that really make sense to you? It may *appeal* to you, but is it advice you'd give someone you care about?

The book is written in a conversational style that's pleasant. There are instructions, of course, but the author doesn't nag. Instead, we're reminded to take the long view of everything, including diet. Dump the microwave and the fast food, and take control of your life by relaxing, getting enough sleep, and eating real food.

Bussell encourages making small changes for the better now, because even if you backslide, over time your progress will snowball into a better quality of life. It's nice to hear that relaxed, longer time-horizon message. It's a calming counterpoint to a culture that pushes the new and the now. Perfection, if it comes, is never quick. Relax, get in balance, and develop healthier habits. Weight loss will follow in time. If this sounds interesting to you, then buy this book.

why calories don't matter

Caloric science is inherently flawed for 5 reasons (at least)

1. it assumes 100% absorption (doesn't count excretion)
   
2. it assumes that the amount of energy released by combustion is the same as released by enzymatic breakdown
3. people in china eat more calories and have less obesity
4. calories from different sources are absorbed differently
5. correlations don't show causation. People who are heavy eat more calories. Did the calories make them fat, or do they need more calories because they are fat? Perhaps they are both symptoms of a deeper problem.

I will go into this deeper at a later time, but it is all explained in my book: The Asian Diet: Simple secrets for eating right, losing weight, and being well. http://www.theasiandiet.com

The Asian Diet, preface

This is the preface to my book, The Asian Diet: Simple secrets for eating right, losing weight, and being well. After you read it, please visit the website, www.theasiandiet.com Then you can visit my office website www.acfom.com which does not talk about diet, but is rather about acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.


Chapter one: Preface

Welcome to the book. I hope you enjoy it; and I hope you learn things that will help you for the rest of your life.

Have you ever noticed the shape of the average American compared to that of the average Asian? America is the most obese nation and the problem is growing rapidly. This trend is the result of poor diet and lifestyles. We are finally waking up to what the Asian cultures can teach us in terms of health care (acupuncture, herbology, tai chi); now it is time to learn what they have discovered about eating and living in balance.

The pieces of material that comprise this book are the combined lessons I try to impart to all of my patients. At the onset of treatment, I give them all a talk about adjusting their diet, lifestyle, and attitudes to improve their health, mood, and longevity. Many of my patients asked where they could get this information in a written form and I was not able to find it. So I wrote it this book.

About Me

I am an acupuncturist and herbalist. I trained in the states and completed advanced training and an internship in China. I am the President of the Illinois Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine and have a private practice with my wife in Wilmette, Illinois. Many astute people have noticed that I am not Asian. What is a white guy doing in Oriental Medicine?

I earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and worked in psychiatric hospitals for several years before returning to school to study pre-med. As I was applying to med schools, I was dismayed at how unhappy the doctors with whom I worked were. I kept hearing "Don't go into medicine. Do anything else. The money is not there, the autonomy's not there, the respect's not there, and even the patient contact isn't there anymore. There's no good reason to be a doctor." The first 20 times I heard it, I shrugged it off. But I kept hearing it and it got to me. Then a nurse with whom I worked told me about the acupuncture program in town. I had been interested in Eastern philosophy since taking a course in high school, but never had considered Oriental Medicine as a career.

I read some books about OM and found the whole paradigm pretty suspect. I come from a family of physicians and was pre-med myself. I understand things like bacteria and viruses; the Chinese talk about things like "wind-cold invading the lung". It was all so foreign and different that I didn't know if I would ever believe in the system. I figured I could make a living at it because enough other people would believe. My skepticism was very short-lived, though, once I saw how effective this medicine is and how much sense the philosophy makes. Now I love what I do. I get to spend a lot of time with my patients, and I get to help them. In psychiatry, I worked pretty much with a chronic population where very few people ever improved. With Oriental Medicine, I am able to help almost all of my patients safely. Oriental Medicine is the acquired wisdom of thousands of years of experimentation, observation and documentation. They have learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. I am a grateful recipient of these lessons. Now I want to share this knowledge with everyone to help them take better care of themselves and live longer and happier lives.

I have presented this information to enough groups and patients to know that this system will be difficult for many people to work with at first. This book presents guidelines and suggestions; but it does not tell you what to do. You have to decide how to implement the suggestions and create your diet. The South Beach Diet was so successful partly because it told people exactly what to do. Many of us like being given a strict structure to follow . . .for a while. But after about 60 days we get tired of having no freedom and break from the prescribed regimen. So I am just planting seeds. How they germinate is up to you. And it is not an all-or-nothing proposition. If you have a bad day, don't give up; start again. We just want to be good on more days.

The opinions expressed in this book are just that – opinions. This book makes no claims of being definitive or authoritative. The principles are written as I understand them from my years of study of Oriental Medicine and Asian culture. The ideas come from many different authors, speakers, researchers, and teachers, folk teachings, and my own ideas of what makes sense. Other authors and disciplines may disagree with some or many of the tenets I will present in these pages. It is up to you, the reader, to decide whether or not this makes sense to you. As far as I know, the Chinese have been studying nutritional therapy longer than anyone else, so I tend to believe that they have figured some things out in the past 4,000 years. The principles are simple:

• Balance and Moderation
• Cooked foods are better than raw
• Vegetables are better than fruit
• White rice is better than brown, but a variety is best
• Diet should be mostly plant-based, with grains and a little of everything else
• Simple foods are better than processed food
• Dairy is not necessary and can be harmful
• Do not over-fill your stomach
• Don't stress too much
• Exercise every day, but not too much
• Keep a Wide perspective and don't sweat the small stuff

All of these will be explained in the book.

What this book is and what it is not.

This is not a weight loss book. This is about getting into balance by eating appropriately. Some of my patients do not need to lose weight but are still very much out of balance. If you have too much weight on you, that is itself an imbalance. By getting into balance, you will naturally shed the excess pounds and become more fit. But even those who do not need to lose weight still need this information. Eating right will prevent or correct all types of disease and disorders. Our daily diet choices are the most important and influential thing we can do to affect our daily, and long term, functioning.

Chinese Dietary Therapy is a highly developed science. There are people who spend their whole lives studying and practicing this. There are food cures for all types of ailments, but that is not what this book is about. If you want to learn how to address a certain ailment with diet therapy, please consult Chinese Nutrition Therapy by Joerg Kastner or Chinese System of Food Cures by Henry Lu (out of print). There is also a lot of information about the foods that we commonly eat and how terrible they are for us. There are many studies that could be cited, but that is not what this book is about either. This book presents the basic guidelines for eating right. Most of us could greatly benefit from these simple changes. If you want to learn what foods to eat to treat a particular disease, or if you want to know everything there is to know about a particular food, read "Healing with Whole Foods" by Paul Pitchford. To learn how we have been misinformed about diet and read all the studies on how harmful our standard food choices are, read "The China Study" by T. Colin Campbell. To learn the basics of eating right and being well, however, read the book in your hands right now.

I am having an interesting experience with the Amazon discussion boards. I posted some of the ideas about eating healthy according to the principles of The Asian Diet and received a lot of criticism and skepticism. "Unless it was ascertained in a lab, it is invalid" (forget about the billions of people benefiting from the Asian diet, and the millions more who are getting obese following the recommendations of "science"). Another woman posts about eating fat-free chocolate every day to lose weight and the responses are all glowing. No one asks for the science behind that suggestion. I see what people want- to eat what they want to eat and not have to think.

There is no shortcut to health. It just entails doing the right things on a consistent basis.

In other news, I have started a facebook cause to get the word out about the Asian diet. Health care costs are going to bury this country if we don't pull up from this nose dive of health. The health of a nation can be a great asset, but our ailing health is a huge liability. Too many people have been manipulated to put money in the hands of the food manufacturers and the health care system. We cannot continue getting less healthy. And the Asian Diet is a great way to start. If you have a facebook account, please search for the cause "get healthy with the asian diet", join it, and tell your friends.

white rice is better than brown

Everybody tells us to eat whole grains. We're supposed to eat brown rice rather than white. They tell us that science shows that brown is better; that it has more vitamins and fiber. Why then do the Chinese eat white rice every day and have less obesity than us?

Brown rice is white rice, but with a thick husk around it. This is like eating walnuts and not taking the shell off. Nature put some nutrients in to make that shell, but they're not for us. They have a poor bio-availability. Our bodies have to take more time to process through the shell. Most of it passes through us with a net loss of energy and a slowing of our metabolism. Difficult-to-digest foods are not good for us and slow down our digestive systems. this steals our energy, makes us lethargic and makes our bodies ask for more food.

White rice is the most hypo-allergenic, easily assimilated, and energetically neutral of the grains. All food and herbs have properties (warming, cooling, moistening, drying, etc.) but white rice is completely neutral. While white rice is the best, though, it should not be taken to the exclusion of the other grains. All foods have things that no other food will give us, so we need a wide variety. You should have all the grains available, even brown rice. If you soak the other grains overnight, they will have the same cooking time as white rice. then you can cook them together and have a wide variety of grains, but cut the concentration of the more difficult-to-digest ones.

Brown rice was popularized in the macrobiotic movement. Their studies used brown rice as it is found in Japan which is partially milled. They take 3/4 of the husk off. The stuff we get here is completely un-shucked and is too difficult to digest (although you could mill it yourself if you really wanted to).

Brown rice was also touted as being superior because of the experience of the Japanese armada. They fed their navy white rice, and they developed beriberi (a disease due to deficiency of B1). Then they fed the brown rice and the beriberi resolved. So there is some B1 that we can pull out of the brown rice. Does that mean we need it? No.

The thing about this experience is: That's all they were feeding the soldiers. Only rice, nothing else. Almost every other fruit, vegetable and meat out there have B1. If you are eating any semblance of a balanced diet, you don't have to worry about beriberi. Also, vegetables will give you all the vitamins and fiber that you need.

In China, they eat just about everything. The fact that they took the time to knock the hull off of the brown rice indicates that there must be a good reason. It makes it easier to digest.

There are those who argue that we want difficult digestion - That by making it harder, the metabolism will respond by working faster. This is like pouring water on a fire to make it burn hotter. It does not work this way; just look at the Asians. All they eat is cooked or pickled and easy to digest foods. they eat more calories per day than us and have less obesity. This is due to efficient digestion.

I wrote a book called “The Asian Diet: simples secrets for eating right, losing weight, and being well” which explains how the lessons of the Asians cultures have contributed to their good dietary habits and can help improve ours. There’s more info at http://www.theasiandiet.com . I know this site is not supposed to be used to sell anything, so I urge you all to check it out from the library. You can read it in a day. There is a lot we can learn from the lessons figured out from thousands of years of experimentation, observation, and documentation.

addressing controversies

It seems that I am stirring up some controversy with my assertions that A)Calories don't matter; and B)White rice is better than brown. This is good. I wanted to challenge the ideas that have been thrust upon us by the food industry scientists. These ideas are all explained fully in my book "The Asian Diet: simple secrets for eating right, losing weight, and being well. htp://www.theasiandiet.com . Let's start with A.

As I posted before, no one measures the calories that we excrete. Not all the food we put in our bodies is absorbed. Only that part which we absorb will turn into energy or become stared as fat; and that amount will vary from person to person. Just because a muffin gives off 200 calories of energy when set on fire (that's how they measure calories), that tells us very little about how many of those calories any particular person will absorb.

They used to think the same thing about vitamins. That the form didn't matter, it was just the amount. Now we understand that vitamins are absorbed differently depending on the form in which they are ingested. The same is true for calories. One the blogs, I see a lot of people assert (as they have been taught) that "A Calorie is a Calorie". This is not true and is an idea put forward by those who's products tend to give off less heat when set on fire (ergo assigned less caloric value). Calories from natural sources will be easier to absorb nutrients, deliver a more steady release of energy to the body, and will be eliminated more efficiently.

and for B. White rice is brown rice with a thick hull around it. It is kind of like eating a walnut and not taking off the shell. Of course, nature had to put some nutrients into making that shell, but those are not for us. They have a poor bio-aviliabilty and will slow the metabolism because they are more difficult to digest. White rice is the best, most hypo-allergenic, easily assimilated, and energetically neutral of the grains (all foods and herbs have properties- warming, cooling, moistening, drying, etc... white rice is completely neutral).

Brown rice was popularized in the macrobiotic movement which started with studies in Japan. Brown rice in Japan in partially milled, which is to say that they've knocked about 3/4 of the hull off. The stuff we get here is completely unshucked. So unless you're going to mill it yourself, it's a tall order for our digestive systems to process.

But what about the vitamins? You should get all the vitamins you need from the vegetables; and veggies should constitute the bulk of your diet. The Japanese armada was feeding its soldiers white rice and they started getting a disease called beriberi that comes from a lack of vitamin b12. They switched to brown rice and the beriberi went away. The thing is: That's all they were feeding the soldiers. B12 is found in virtually every fruit and vegetable. So as long as you are eating produce, you won't have to worry about beriberi.