The Non-White Diet

 

avoid white foods. If you eliminate sugar, flour, bread, potatoes, white rice, and white bread, you'll do fine. (See Tim Ferriss here.) Reducing the amount of carbohydrates you eat (and everything white above is carbohydrates) will help you lose weight while lowering your trigylceride levels --which is a good thing, since they can cause heart disease. A low carbohydrate diet can also reduce inflammation, which can in turn reduce your odds of getting cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. (Both of these tidbits are from the April 2008 issue of Men's Health magazine, pages 46 and 50.) If you're ever in the Philippines, a key to maintaining your weight is do not eat the rice. Filipinos eat white rice, and huge amounts of it, with every meal. I've seen them pile plates with mounds of rice, and the average meal is just that mound of rice and a topping, like dried fish (buwad) or vegetables. White rice is pure carbohydrate, and enough to to send a diabetic plunging like a Japanese zero into the waves. If you're not a diabetic yet, you will be. And white rice is a nutritional vaccuum. In Cebu, a local variety of rice is called "puso," in which rice is steamed in woven leaf packages. I've ordered one or two of the small bundles with barbecue and had Filipinos give me that quizzical "Are you kidding?" look. I guess you're supposed to order them in gargantuan quantities like every other pot-bellied Filipino. Another option is "red rice," which is unpolished rice that has a reddish tinge to it. It's far better on diabetics and diabetics-in-training because the fiber in it slows down the glucose blood sugar spike that immediately follows eating white rice. Red rice also has some nutritional value.