Sharing Gifts of Food for Christmas, by the Book : 1988’s Holiday Volumes Address Topics From Cookies to Environmental Toxins

Choose to Live by Joseph D. Weissman MD (Grove Press: $18.95, 324 pp., illustrated)

If you’ve ever wondered what you can do to fight environmental toxins that cause many of today’s deadly diseases, you may want to take a look at Weissman’s fight-back program.

The changes he proposes include a 10-week program of life-style changes in diet by reducing intake of meat, eggs and dairy products and increasing intake of grains, vegetables and fruit. An exercise program shows up on the third week of the program and is maintained throughout life.

When dealing with what Weissman calls the X-factor--the insidious rise in environmental toxins that affect health--the reader is urged to include vitamin supplements in the diet, and to eliminate processed foods and beverages. For instance, it’s best to stop drinking tap water, beer, wine, liquor, coffee, tea, harmful herbal teas, cocoa, colas and some commercially prepared vegetables and fruit juices, and avoid such toxins as chlorine, trihalomethanes, lead, cadmium, organic pollutants, solvents, various toxins, alkaloids, pesticides, salt and preservatives. Even if you don’t adopt the diet or adhere 100% to Weissman’s X-Factor theory, you will do yourself and family a favor by updating yourself on pollutants that are on the rise on our planet.

Weissman, who is a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine and director of the Medical Center for Health and Longevity in Torrance, California, also sets the record straight on the common misconception that meat proteins contain all the essential amino acids while plant proteins require mixing and matching to form complete proteins. “The notion for proper combining of amino acids became widespread after various authors of vegetarian cookbooks popularized it,” he writes, “most notably Frances Moore Lappe in ‘A Diet For a Small Planet.’

“Ms. Lappe has since admitted the error of her ways in the 10th anniversary revision of her book . . . . Thus the food complementarity concept is incorrect, confusing, and discourages people from changing to a vegetarian diet, if they so choose. In short, proper food combining to form complete proteins is a nonproblem, a concept whose demise is long overdue,” writes Weissman.