The diet test: Healthy from head to toe ★★★☆☆

Who is this book for?

For anyone interested in the functioning of the body and the influence of diet and lifestyle on it.

First impression

The cover promises a practical book with lots of advice, tips and recipes. But you have to sit down for this. What a big pill and what a full page! The book looks like a textbook, although it usually doesn’t contain recipes. In eleven chapters, different systems in the body are discussed, from the cardiovascular system and the digestive system, to the skin, the immune system and the respiratory system. Each chapter usually ends with a recipe from Pascale Naessens. The chapters give a lot of explanation about the functioning of the body in a way that you also find in biology and anatomy books. You then read in a summary about the various disorders that can occur in the specific body system. The cardiovascular system is therefore concerned with high and low blood pressure, heart failure, aneurysms, varicose veins, arteriosclerosis, strokes and cardiac arrhythmias. Each section contains lists of advice and each chapter closes with lifestyle advice to keep that system healthy. Almost every chapter also contains an interview (as one piece or in parts) with an expert, such as cardiologist Janneke Wittekoek or biochemist Harry Wichers. An overview of the literature used completes each chapter.

What do we know about the authors?

Nienke Gottenbos is an intestinal flora therapist and nutritionist, Ralph Moorman is a food technologist specializing in nutrition, hormones and anti-aging, Juglen Zwaan is an orthomolecular therapist and nutritionist and Pascale Naessens is a nutritionist and specialized in low-carbohydrate recipes. They have all written several books and are successful entrepreneurs in health.

What’s New About This Diet Book?

The link between all the different body systems and advice for diet and lifestyle is usually not worked out in this way.

Read on

In the first place, this is not really a book to read from front to back in one sitting. The information is told in a simple way, but it is a lot and complex and above all a lot of information per page. The book can of course serve as a reference book or to find out what applies to you if you suffer from a certain system in the body or would like to prevent certain complaints. However, you quickly get bogged down in all kinds of lists of things to do. For example, a list to lower your blood pressure includes: eat flaxseed every day, eat kiwis regularly, drink pomegranate juice, drink beetroot juice and drink hibiscus tea. And we’re just talking about lowering blood pressure. For example, for healthy skin you should take extra vitamin D, use liver products for vitamin A, eat free fatty acids from salmon and mackerel, drink green tea and eat broccoli and strawberries for the antioxidants. Go through eleven chapters and it’s guaranteed to make you dizzy. With each chapter, Juglen Zwaan also gives additional advice for supplements that you can use.

What can you do with it in practice?

It is a good thing to learn more about how your body functions, which systems are in your body and how diet and lifestyle can intervene. Unfortunately, some pieces of advice contradict each other in the different chapters. It is precisely the desire to be complete and the countless lists of advice that do not make it all easier to put together. The broad outline that the authors promise in the foreword – seeing the body as a complete whole in which all systems communicate with each other – is missing.

What does the dietitian think of the diet – does it really help?

The book really lacks an overarching chapter in which all the advice comes together. Of course there are individual good advice in each chapter, but the complete picture is missing. That doesn’t make it practical. Many of the recommendations in the book are supported by a literature reference. That sounds scientific, but there is a lot to say about it. Usually it is just a single reference. That, for example, eating kiwi is good for blood pressure may well come from a study, but real scientific evidence is only available if different studies have the same results. Here, so-called ‘cherry picking’ has been carried out in order to obtain a suitable investigation with regard to the advice. It is quite strange that some literature references appear three or four times in the same list for a chapter. For example, a bibliography quickly looks long and impressive. And then about the recipes. Nice idea to put recipes in a book like this, but to be honest I think there are far too few. It is never possible to summarize all the recommendations for that system with one recipe per system. Of course Naessens is very good at making recipes and they also look good, but what can you do with 12 recipes for 11 systems? I would have preferred to see examples of menus in which you can see how you can apply the advice given in its entirety. Finally, I absolutely do not support all the supplementation advice in the book. With a well-composed diet, it can be determined individually where supplementation is needed. It is not advisable to just swallow everything.

Verdict:

Pros

• Extensive and in-depth explanation of how your body functions
• Reference book
• Lots of tips
• Tasty recipes

Negatives

• Complex and sometimes a lot of information.
• Too many different lists
• Question marks about the scientific basis
• Total picture is missing
• Few recipes