The Fallacy of the Calorie: Why the Modern Western Diet Is Killing Us and How to Stop It

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in The Physiology of Taste, two months before his death, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are." In the almost two hundred years since its publication in 1825 we have borne witness to the ultimate veracity of such a simple observation. We have seen that truism reflected in our own modern Western diet. It is a diet that delivers us unto the disabilities and diseases of modern civilization: obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal disease, neurologic disease, and autoimmune disease. Disabilities and diseases that have at their root a chronic, continuous low-level inflammation. Now for the first time, Dr. Mike, cardiologist and chef, reveals the how and the why of the modern Western diet. He explains how we are hardwired to seek out sugar, salt, and fat. He details how that greed for these consumables allowed us to become the most dominant species on the planet and to construct the most technologically advanced and complex social structure the world has ever known. But that progress has not come without a price. Dr. Mike identifies the changes to our food and food pathways that occurred at the onset of the Industrial Revolution and have become particularly pronounced over the last fifty to seventy-five years. Changes that have disrupted our physiology and our relationship with our symbiotic gut microbiome. Changes that have produced the modern Western diet with its dysbiosis, disabilities, and diseases of modern civilization. With the eye of a chef and a deep understanding of, and appreciation for, the experiential nature and integral role that food and cuisine have in our society, and our own personal health and wellness, Dr. Mike crafts a prescription to break the vicious cycle of addiction at the heart of the modern Western diet. This journey to an intestinal revolution to metabolic health is a "Code Delicious(TM)!"