The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life: How to Reduce Fat in Your Diet and Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease

by Ray Kurzweil

Book Overview

Reducing the level of fat in your diet to 10% can save your life, and this book gives you all the tools you need to do just that. Everything you need to know about is in this book- recipes, conversion charts, pantry staples, dining-out tips, progress tables, an exercise program, and detailed appendixes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517883015
• ISBN13: 9780517883013
• Release Date: December 1994
• Publisher: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent
• Length: 386 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

How to save a million American lives a year!

Cancer is a prevalent disease that is dramatically reduced by a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. Societies with the lowest cancers such as breast, ovarian, colon, uterine, and prostate are very low fat. Societies with extremely high fat diets have extremely high levels of cancer. In China, the diet consists primarily of vegetables and grains. Most Chinese are not wealthy enough to afford the luxury of our high-fat foods. Cholesterol levels are typically 100 to 150, with an average level around 127 and heart disease is rare. Cancer feeds off cholesterol in the blood and effectively cleanses the blood of cholesterol. Societies that eat low fat dies have very low cholesterol levels and extremely low rates of both heart disease and heart disease. For example, colon cancer dramatically lowers cholesterol levels, and if the patient lives long enough cause a regression of the atherosclerotic plaque. LDL transports cholesterol from the liver to the body and has been strongly implicated as a primary agent for the buildup of atherosclerotic plaque. Triglycerides are the free floating fat in the bloodstream and elevated triglyceride levels is a risk factor for heart disease. HDL carries cholesterol away from the arteries and back to the liver to be discarded. A normal cholesterol to HDL is 4.5. Fat should not exceed 10% of the daily calorie limits. Fruit and vegetables are especially healthy for you. Fish have low to moderate levels of fat called Omega 3 which are beneficial and help break down Omega 6 fats in the body. Meat high in saturated fats should be eaten sparingly, if not at all. Meat is high in cholesterol and following the 10% guidelines reduces both LDL and iron levels and can reduce heart disease by 90%. "Atherosclerosis Research Institute of the University Of Southern California School Of Medicine" found that the more polyunsaturated fats where consumed by a group of middle-age men who had undergone coronary bypass surgery, the greater was their risk of developing new lesions in their arteries. Fat causes blood cell aggregation or blood sludging and this makes it impossible for them to pass through smaller capillaries that provide oxygen to the body's tissues. If you eat a meal high in fat, you will temporarily deprive your brain of significant oxygen, which is one reason that people feel groggy after eating a meal rich in fat. Polyunsaturated fats interact with oxygen to form free-radicals molecules that can damage cell membranes and are associated with premature aging and development of cancer. Low in saturated fat has no cholesterol at all. Exercise needs to be a part of scheduled daily activity and between 300-1000 calories a day needs to be burned in a one hour workout. Exercise combined with a low fat, low sodium and low cholesterol reduces heart disease and cancer problems massively. Exercise and diet reduces spontaneous clotting, improves bowl functions, reduces the likelihood of colon cancer, suppresses appet

Excellent book

This is a terrific book. Why? 1) Because it is scientifically based unlike many fad diet books 2) Because it does not appear that Mr Kurzweil is simply going for a fast buck with a nonsense diet like so many book in the market those days 3) The writing style makes for easy, pleasant and persuasive reading 4) This book will in all likelihood DRAMATICALLY improve the health of many of its readers There is at least one point that I think should be improved for the next edition. It is the country by country fat consumption vs heart disease risk, "linear" chart. The problem here is that as presented the data do not entirely justify the conclusion. Indeed one can easily see that virtually all high-fat countries are also the most industrialised countries (USA, Germany, etc) and all the ultra-low fat countries (Thailand, Chiana, etc) are developping. Why is this important? This is because has a group the less developped have typically a life-expectancy lower by about 10 years (typically due to increased infections and accidents) than the higher developped countries. Therefore it is EXPECTED that these countries should have a lower rate of heart disease than higher developped countries with higher life-expectancies, regardless of eating habits. This is because heart disease hits hardest the higher age group (60+), a group that is numerously less important in developping countries. Furthermore, in developping countries, it is not clear that medical care is sufficiently developped so that proper death cause are recorded. Perhaps they use categories such as "old age" for cause of death while we use more precise cause due to better availability of diagnostic tests. I think Mr Kurzweill should try to remove that bias from those charts (it should be relatively easy to adjust for the first problem: the different baseline life expectancy between countries, by using heart disease at different age and life tables). I don't think that the corrected results would lead to entirely different results (although there is a very slight possibility it could) mainly because there are different other corroborative studies (autopsy study on young men, reversal of atherosclerosis following a ultra-low fat intake) in favor of ultra-low fat regimes. Still, this would strenghtened Mr Kurzweill valiant review, at least in rigorous scientific circles. Congratulation Mr Kurzweill. You should be given an honorific medical degree. You earned it more than many of us for the improvement of individual and population health.

A Must-Read for those who want to LIVE!

The author is a scientist, not a nutritionist, who literally saved his life from terminal illness by researching how diet correlates with disease. The "hook" is that virtually EVERY reader in the USA has atherosclerosis --but does not know it! One detail overlooked (but noted by Andrew Weil, MD, elsewhere) is the essential ratio of omega-3 to omega-6. Very practical suggestions. You will die unnecessarily early if you fail to follow this advice. Makes tough technical stuff easy to read, understand & live by.

The 20 Percent Solution for A Healthy Life

One of the best books on the subject, if not thee best. I've read Pritikin, McDougal, Depak Shopak (spelling), Ornish, even Susan Powter, and all the others during a 1 year exhaustive search of the medical facts on heart health and disease. This is the only book I continue to recommend to absolutely everyone who wants the truth about animal fat and it's relationship to whatever ails you, from heart disease to depression. I personally have not had one single day of depression since I went completely off dairy products. Kurzweil has changed my life and it's been one of the answers I had been looking for for many years. Nutrition is definitely one of the cures for all maladies. All who read this book can't help but benefit for themselves and those they love or cook for.

No "FADS" here--just FACTS

Standing out from a field of "fad" diet books(The Zone;Sugar Busters;Atkins,etc.) like a pearl in a sea of mud,The 10% Solution is a lucid, intelligently written,well-documented eating plan that really works.(I know--I've been following it for some time now,with fantastic results) Kurzweil is NOT a nutritionist--rather,he's a computer scientist--but he's clearly done his homework,and his writing style and format make it easy for anyone to understand the principles of a healthy diet. Yet he doesn't over-simplify,or insult the reader with emotional pleas and lack of documentation. In a nutshell,the "10% Solution" means that no more than 10% of the calories in your diet should come from fat. Extreme? (After all,the FDA,AHA,and other mainstream entities recommend a diet consisting of 30% of calories from fat) Not at all,as Kurzweil convincingly demonstrates. What's extreme is the eating habits cultivated by "developed" societies like our own ov! er the last century,where undue emphasis is placed on fat. The author compares our typical diet with one from rural Asia,along with respective heart disease and cancer rates. The figures are staggering. Yes--despite what you've heard from the latest fad diet promoters--fat IS the culprit(of course,SOME fat is necessary). A truly low-fat,nutritionally balanced eating program is an enormous factor in attaining good overall health. And,yes,you can(and will,no doubt) lose weight on this regimen--but more importantly, you'll feel better and improve your health immensely. Cutting down to 10% of calories from fat does take some adjustments,but it's not as hard to do as many may think,and Kurzweil makes it easier with a section of recipes. I've read quite a few books on diet and nutrition,and this is clearly the best-written one I've personally seen. Read it and change your life for the better.