Everyday Systems

Mark Bittman has a new book coming out at the end of the month: VB6. VB6 = vegan before 6 PM. It's a book about diet and weight loss. He introduced this concept in his book Food Matters in 2009 and wrote a companion cookbook the following year.

Another angle, another book.

Interesting....seeing as how veganism is a lifestyle (not just a diet) I can't even fathom the concept.

Eeyore wrote:Interesting....seeing as how veganism is a lifestyle (not just a diet) I can't even fathom the concept.

I think there are a lot of people who follow a vegan diet for reasons of health, but don't embrace the lifestyle.

there are always going to be these "Diets" and i think we are best to just know what we are doing makes sense and let others dabble in this nonsense if they want to. we can't stop them from doing it, we can just hope they will see the insanity in it and move on to something more sane.

I'm just reading Food Matters now, though the concept is not new to me.I borrowed it mostly because in flipping through it at the library, I saw he had a few pages of spice mixes. I tend not to cook up recipes but to make plain versions of things and add sauces later.

I always think it's interesting how these authors imply that the changes they are asking for are simple, as if a few days of eating unprocessed food is going to wipe out all the attraction. For most people, diet changes are an evolution. But weight loss sells.

It's too bad that he's promoting a rigid concept, and selling it for weight loss. "Food Matters" is much more flexible -- he says HE is vegan before six and it work for HIM, but that what he's trying to encourage is cutting down on (not eliminating) consumption of processed food and animal products and that any way you accomplish that is good. And his reasons for encouraging it are moral, political, and health-driven, not primarily about weight loss.

I hate to see him jumping on the "miracle diet rules" bandwagon, because he's always struck me as someone whose approach to food is very thoughtful, moderate, and driven by flavor. The Food Matters Cookbook has some GREAT recipes in it! I've cooked out of it a lot.

I would chalk this up to the pressure to write and sell books to keep "the brand" in high profile.

I used to be virtually vegan and it didn't seem to make any difference to my health or weight (I don't know if he's claiming it does).

He claims that going virtually vegan and cutting out processed food dramatically improved his health and he also lost a bunch of weight -- and yeah, he's implying that you'll get the same results.

You can lose weight as a vegan. You can also gain weight as a vegan. It's all about the amount you eat. Vegan foods are not necessarily superfoods. Oreos are vegan. If the author's point is that the vegan foods must be unprocessed, then you could lose weight eating any number of non-vegan unprocessed foods as well. It's not a miracle diet.