Metabolize: The Personalized Program for Weight Loss

The past few years have seen an array of diet books that cancel each other out. When one doctor recommends an extremely low-fat diet and another pushes a high-fat plan, the consumer is left with three choices: low-fat is right; high-fat is right; or both are wrong and the answer to our weight-control problems lies elsewhere.

Coauthor Kenneth Baum, an athletic trainer, found a fourth choice when he was seeking an answer to his own weight problems: metabolic typing. It takes the point of view that both high-fat and low-fat are right, along with some nutrient ratios between the extremes. It all depends on your individual metabolism.

Metabolic typing isn't exactly a science yet, but it makes some intuitive sense. If you look around the world, you see cultures that eat very differently--native peoples in Alaska with their super-high-fat diets; tribes in Africa and South America that eat almost all fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts. Are these people merely eating the food available to them, or did they make evolutionary changes over hundreds of generations that made their bodies dependent upon these disparate diets? And, if the latter occurred, wouldn't it make sense that people in today's melting-pot cultures would have different dietary needs?

Metabolize divides us into five dietary types (a simple 26-question quiz tells you which type you are):

• Super-lean (the suggested diet is 70 percent carbohydrates, 15 percent protein, and 15 percent fat, or 70/15/15)
  
• Lean (60/20/20)
  
• Mixed (50/25/25)
  
• Clean (40/30/30)
  
• Super-clean (35/35/30)
  

As with all of these diet books, the ideas in general seem feasible, but there are demons in the details. For example, the diets he recommends top out at 1,800 calories--okay for some women, but brutal for guys. But on the other hand, eating on this plan should be interesting, no matter what your type. Dozens of foods make it onto the "preferred" list in each type, so there's never a shortage of new things to try. --Lou Schuler