What’s Wrong With The Beverly Hills Diet?
It’s supposed to be the secret of Hollywood stars, or so claims Judy Mazel, author of The Beverly Hills Diet which previously made it to the bestseller lists of both the New York Times and Time magazine.
In her diet plan, Mazel said you can lose weight without feeling hungry. That’s because you can eat all the ice cream, steak or whatever you want and leave the rest to the body’s powerful enzymes which supposedly burn away fat. Mazel’s incredible weight loss strategy is to “lose weight by feeding the body, not by starving it.”
Mazel stressed out that the reason why we gain weight are the undigested food that we intake, in which it can be easily solved by combining the right food that we eat. One of the best ways to implement that is to never mix the kind of food you are going to eat, like don’t mix fruits with meat, or carbs with protein, or chicken with mash potato! When you came to know and practice this strategy, you wouldn’t have to worry about gaining weight again even if you eat all day.
But there’s a catch. The person should eat the fruits’ seeds for the first 10 days of her diet plan. This is because the seed’s enzymes are supposedly the ones that’s going to burn all fats. Meaning you are required to eat the seeds of grapes, papayas, and others fruits.
Raw fruits and vegetables do contain enzymes but they are useless to us since human enzymes are far different from those that come from plants, explained Arnold Bender, vice president of the International Union of Food Science and Technology.
What Mazel fails to mention is that living on fruits can deprive the body of vitamin D, protein, calcium, potassium, iron, thiamine, and niacin. This, reliable nutritionists say, can lead to heart failure, osteoporosis (brittle bones), and anemia.
“It may cause serious problems, especially for people with ulcers, diabetes or gastrointestinal problems, according to Dr. Susan Baker of the Boston Children’s Hospital, the world’s largest pediatric research center. Eating the seeds of various fruits can also be dangerous since they may contain toxins.
Mazel’s point is that it will aid in your digestion if you know how to combine the right foods to eat. Then let the enzymes do their part. But according to the doctors, our body enzymes can digest all those food intakes all at the same time.
Mazel supposedly arrived at this “revolutionary” theory after studying the findings of various nutritionists, scientists, and doctors. But most of her sources are unnamed. Perhaps her unknown experts also gave her the idea that the thymus gland in the chest produces enzymes that digest milk.
Bender added that the truth is that enzymes are not contained in gland, and that the thymus has no connection with our digestion just like what Mazel is telling about.
Looking at Mazel’s credentials will probably explain why her diet plan is absurd. She started as a secretary and later became a “self-taught nutritionist” which is just like saying anyone can be a brain surgeon even without attending a course in medicine.
“Mazel has some very strange notions about the body and how it works, most of which are not only false but absurd. To contend that undigested food somehow becomes fat in the body, and is the only source of body fat, betrays a first-grader’s level of knowledge of the body and its functions,” concluded Kurt Butler and Dr. Lynne Rayner of the University of Hawaii in The Best Medicine.
You don’t have to starve yourself to lose weight. It all boils down to controlling calories and doing the right exercises.
You must log in to post a comment.