Well, this is a partial review of the book, "The Perfect Health Diet" only because someone else said exactly what I was going to. In the book, the authors recommend a lower amount of carbs (20%), in order to keep glucose levels right below necessary levels. Here's what another reader recently said:
"Another interesting comment came from Jim Jozwiak:
Paul, this discussion gets to the crux of what I do not understand about the Perfect Health Diet. You are speaking as if refilling liver glycogen is a good thing, and it undoubtedly is, because mood is so much better when there is sufficient liver glycogen because then the brain is confident of its power supply. Also, you acknowledge that safe starch would eventually replenish liver glycogen after muscle glycogen is topped off. So why not eat enough starch to replenish liver glycogen? It is not so difficult to figure out how much that would be. Have some sugar, feel what replenished liver glycogen is like, then titrate safe starch gradually meal-by-meal to get the same effect. When I do it, and I am not an athlete, I get 260 grams of non-fiber carb per day, which is considerably more than you usually recommend. Have you tried this experiment and found the result unsatisfactory in some way?
Jim has experimented to find the amount of carbs that optimize his mood, and found it to be 260 g (1040 calories). On a 2400 calorie diet, typical for men, this would be 43% carbs.
If Peat typically recommends 180 to 250 g carbs, as Danny says, then on a 2000 calorie reference diet that would be 36% to 50% carbs.
Those numbers are strikingly similar to another statistic: The amount of carbs people actually eat in every country of the world."
So can billions of people be wrong about carbs in general? Somehow I don't think so.
I don't know how many grams of carbs I eat per day, but I'm sure it's above 150 grams. And I've noticed the same thing: if I go too low in starch, my mood suffers.
I think Peat's sugar recommendations are basically flawed, but that's another story.
I thought PHD diet was a good book, but it suffers from some flaws, primarily related to carbs. Early in the book, it says carbs above the minimum level raise blood sugar and have negative effects. Yet later in the appendix, a vegetarian version of the diet is presented saying high carbs are no problem. So which is it?
In the post I linked to, they say that if they were to rewrite the book, they would have higher carb ranges, which I believe is a step in the right direction.
Otherwise, there were some good sections about how toxins in various foods present problems. And the tone of the book is non-dogmatic, which makes for pleasant reading.






