Fight Fat with Fat

2nd edition

New information, more recipes

Dr. John P. Salerno,

Board Certified Family Practice

Complementary Medicine

Book Publishers Network

P.O. Box 2256

Bothell, WA 98041

425-483-3040

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copy written materials.

BaconFreak.com is the ultimate online bacon superstore. They sell three dozen varieties of gourmet bacon, including nitrate-free bacon and thick-cut artisan bacon, as well as bacon jerky. Find more original recipes on their blog,

This book is intended solely for informational and educational purposes and not as personal medical advice. Please consult your doctor if you have any questions about your health.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

LCCN 2014932470

ISBN 978-1-940598-24-6

Digital ISBN: 978-1-940598-60-4

Editor: Julie Scandora

Cover Designer: Laura Zugzda

Typographer: Marsha Slomowitz

eBook: Marcia Breece

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Top Ten Questions About Fight Fat With Fat Diet

Introduction

PART I

Diabetes, Diet, and Good Health

PART II

The Fight Fat with Fat Diet Detox Full Fat Fast

Soft-cooked Eggs

Hard-cooked Eggs

Poached Eggs

Coddled Eggs

Oeufs en Cocotte

Microwaved Eggs

Fried Eggs

Scrambled Eggs

Pickled Eggs

Perfect Omelets

Deviled Eggs

Egg Salad

Saucy Vodka Chicken

Sautéed Flank Steak with Anchovy Sauce

Bourbon Chicken Liver Pâté

Apple-smoked Pork Loin

Pork Medallions in Capers

Grilled Pesto Lamb Chops

Super-easy Baked Ham

Branzino with Walnut Purée

Seared Scallops with Gremolata

Seared Cod with Browned Butter and Almonds

Lemon Yellow Tail with Tomato-dill Sauce

Curry-orange Salmon

Grilled Salmon Provencal with Yogurt Sauce

Bone Broth

Lemon Water

Full-fat Chocolate Ice Cream

Classic Custard

Cinnamon Soufflé

French Chocolate Cake (Flourless)

PART III

The Fight Fat with Fat Marathon

Thai Beef Lettuce Wraps

Shrimp and Mango, Butter-lettuce Wraps with Peanut-Sauce

Chipotle Scallop Lettuce Wraps

Pan-grilled Fish with Chermoula

Gingered Tilapia with Baby Spinach

Sole à la Bonne Femme

Sautéed Shrimp on Red Cabbage with Parsley Sauce

Grilled Chili Shrimp with Avocado-orange Salsa

Warm Salmon Salad with Caper Dressing

Artichokes, Capers, Olives, Lemon Zest, and Salmon on Spaghetti Squash

Dijon Egg and Salmon Salad

Coq au Vin

Chicken Breast in a Kalamata-caper Sauce

Easy-roast Chicken Thighs and Asparagus

Chicken Thighs in a Mushroom Sauce

Feta-stuffed Chicken

Thanksgiving Turkey with Low-carb Stuffing

Basil-parsley Chicken Salad

Hotcha Flank Steak

Hoisin Beef Stir-fry with Asparagus and Sweet Bell Peppers

Stilton Beef with Sherry-mushroom Sauce

Roast Pork Loin with Dry-cured Olives

Five-spice Lamb Chops with Raspberry Salsa

Parvathy Ramachandran’s Eggplant-chickpea Gravy

St. Croix Curry

Bacon, Sausage, and Cabbage Soup

Kale with Garlic and Bacon

Dijon Salmon with Bacon and Pecans

Bacon-wrapped Brussels Sprouts

Curried Roasted Cauliflower with Bacon

Texas Caviar

Summer Fruit Salsa

Bloody Mary Shrimp Dipper

Appendix

About The Author

About The Salerno Center

Preface

John P. Salerno

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the late, great Dr. Robert Atkins who was my boss, my mentor, and my friend. I worked in his office as a young doctor and saw with my own eyes the value of the protocols he developed—first to help people with heart disease, and then, almost as if by accident, to help people lose weight.

What did Atkins really say? He said that a low-carb diet could help treat heart disease and help people lose weight. He was right.

But since I started out in his office, our environment has changed dramatically, and the changes significantly affect the food we eat—and our health. In the last twenty years, the food supply in the United State has degraded, and with it, obesity and other lifestyle ailments, including diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s, have gotten much, much worse.

It is as if our very environment—the food, the water, the air, all that we take for granted—has become poisoned.

In order to save our own lives and the planet, we must adopt sustainable practices at the table. This means understanding that our health depends on sustainable agriculture products and practices and public policy that support health.

In 2010, I went to Washington, DC, to testify before the USDA about the proposed food pyramid. I said what I believe, that the FDA has corrupted the process of formulating the food pyramid and has made recommendations to Americans that do not support health.

Now, I am encouraged to note that a significant body of scientists has signed on to form a committee agreeing with my position—that Americans must be provided with a safer, more nourishing food supply. Our very lives depend on it.

So many issues can interfere with our health and well-being. This fact was brought home to me, up close and personal, when I volunteered at ground zero after 9-11. I began treating people who had volunteered to help in the dreadful task of picking through the rubble, hunting for survivors after the attack on the World Trade Center. Some of those hapless souls have become my patients, and I have cared for them ever since.

So what can the ordinary person do to protect himself? Eat organic produce. Choose wild-caught fish and grass-fed beef. Drink filtered water (and not from a plastic bottle). Purify the air in your home if you live in a polluted area.

These precautions will help to normalize your weight, improve your health, and make for a long and glorious middle age. If Dr. Atkins were alive today, he would agree since he knew the connection between what we eat and the health of our bodies.

To achieve that goal of a healthy life, we must exercise our true power in the marketplace. We begin by being aware of what we put into our mouths. Then we act upon that awareness by choosing wisely. We reject GMO foods, industrial farming, and confined-animal feeding operations and provide a healthier dinner table for ourselves and our children.

The power to create the environment we need for a healthy life rests with each one of us.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the many people in my life who have been so important to me in creating this book.

First, I would like to thank my brother Louis for his always brilliant advice and caring. He has given me the inspiration and shown me the work ethic I needed to be successful.

I would also like to thank my wonderful parents, John and Louise, who have always nurtured me with love and support beyond words.

My wife, Helene, and my nine-year-old son, John, and five-year-old daughter, Sophia, have always been there for me and have lent their unconditional support and love. My children now remind me what is bad for me to eat. John is an avid cyclist, who rides with me every morning, rain or shine. It is on these special rides where I have received perhaps the best insight for my book from a child’s perspective. Sophia, the aspiring artist and dancer, has given me ideas for the importance of developing healthy taste buds at an early age and is also quick to remind me to give her daily vitamins.

Lastly, Aunt Josie was my inspiration to take vitamins at an early age and is always there for me.

Introduction

We have virtually eradicated polio, measles, and other devastating diseases, made childbirth significantly safer for both mothers and infants, and saved countless lives with antibiotics. Likewise, dramatically lower rates of infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, influenza, and periodontal disease mean that today’s children, unlike their peers seventy years ago, can expect to survive beyond their first few years.

However, the United States is on the verge of a health crisis of monumental proportions. These and other impressive medical victories are now being undermined by a bevy of health problems, many of our own making. For the first time, children born today are likely to have a shorter lifespan than their parents, thanks to damage that will be wrought by the terrible trio of obesity, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.

Our genes undeniably play a role in our health and longevity; nonetheless, up to 80 percent of disease is the result of environmental forces.

I use the term “environmental” in the broadest sense to include lifestyle choices we can control. These include what we eat, whether we consume alcohol or smoke, how physically active we are, even the household products we use, as well as those largely beyond our control—including but not limited to industrial toxins in the air and water and pesticides that contaminate and weaken the soil.

We are beginning to pay the price for our disregard for the environment, not just in terms of global warming—devastating as that is—but also in our own health and that of our children. The facts are:

The actual lifespan of Americans who survive infancy has not changed in more than sixty years.
Sixty-five percent of American adults are overweight or obese.
Diabetes has become epidemic in the United States and is on the rise throughout the world.

Even as our bodies are burdened with an increasingly greater toxic burden, we are less able to defend ourselves against assault, weakened as we are by the standard American diet. And now, we are exporting this unhealthful way of eating to the rest of the world.

The multiple reasons for the decline in our overall health are reflected in these facts:

There are more than one hundred thousand chemicals in regular use in the United States, with an additional seven new ones approved every day.
Infants are born with almost three hundred chemicals in their blood.
Our bodies contain hundreds of toxins, including some—such as DDT—that were banned thirty years ago.
Common pesticides and other chemicals that mimic hormones are implicated in the sharp rise of genital abnormalities in infants and low sperm counts in men.
According to the US Geological Survey in a 2002 study of stream water samples, 69 percent contained detergents and 66 percent contained disinfectants. The oceans—and their fish—are contaminated with heavy metals and other toxins.
Our factory-farm-raised meat and dairy products are laced with growth hormones and antibiotics. Much of the soil in which crops are grown is depleted of vital nutrients, such as calcium, phosphorus, iron, selenium, chromium, and riboflavin.

Therein lies a double whammy: Not only are our air, water, and soil increasingly toxic, but also our food supply, which would normally protect our bodies from toxins, lacks the nutrients to do the job. To compound the problem, our diet is increasingly dominated by foods without much nutritive value, other than calories—fast foods, especially foods full of white flour, sugar, and other refined carbohydrates, as well as trans fats, which may actually do more harm than good as a diet staple.

Most industrialized countries have eliminated hunger as a public health problem, only to have it replaced with another dangerous condition: obesity.

And ironically, people who subsist on doughnuts, bagels, cheeseburgers, potato chips, pizza, soft drinks, and other junk food may be undernourished, even though they are well upholstered.

Obesity and starvation are two sides of the same coin.

According to one Harvard study, the average American eats only three servings of vegetables and fruit a day, a mere one and a half cups, while nine servings, or four and a half cups, are optimal. Shortchanging the diet in such a serious way means missing out on the natural sources for many vitamins and minerals.

Traditional cultures worldwide and over time have gathered whole, unprocessed foods, grown close to home and cooked in simple ways, to produce meals that taste good and nourish the body and the soul. A healthy ration of natural animal fats, including generous portions of saturated fats, have been proven in numerous studies since the 1920s to have salutary effects on everything from brain function to cancer.

Over the past thirty years, Americans have been bombarded by a food industry that threw out theses common-sense notions and turned the family farm into a feedlot. This, in turn, led to a depletion in the quality of animal meat, as well as the soil itself. Then the pharmaceutical industry stepped in to help, offering up an ever more complicated array of solutions to all of the ills that followed, including the introduction of food-like substances that neither nourish nor satisfy.

The food industry and pharmaceutical industry have been telling Americans that low-fat diets are best for their health. That is, quite simply, a lie.

You can see the result on any street in America today. We are the fattest of the Western countries. Ironically, most of the diseases that plague us in the twenty-first century—specifically, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, many forms of cancer, and even Alzheimer’s—are associated with excess consumption. Excess intake of white flour, sugar, other refined carbohydrates, and trans-fats are the culprits that rob us of our health, stamina, and long life.

Nutrition is the stepchild of the medical establishment, which focuses on treating illness after the fact, usually with expensive drugs—each with its long list of side effects—rather than on prevention through eating well. This continues, despite the fact that statistics published by the American Medical Association show that 73 percent of all diseases are directly related to nutrition.

Meanwhile, the drug industry experiences peak health, stimulated by expanding markets for new products. Government agencies and health organizations, like the American Cancer Society, routinely state that the causes for most of the disease they represent are unknown.

And so the elephant in the living room continues to go unmentioned. This conscious blindness of the role of the diet and the environment is akin to a refusal to acknowledge the reality of global warming.

The evidence cannot be ignored. Men’s average sperm count has declined by about one-third over the last thirty years. A male resident of the United States is eight times more likely to die of prostate cancer than a man in Japan.

We have treated our planet like a garbage dump, and now the toxins are coming home to roost—in our bodies and the bodies of our unborn children. It turns out that when a person experiences genetic damage as a result of a toxin the defective gene can be passed on to the succeeding generations.

The prognosis may sound grim, but I firmly believe there is a solution, and a relatively simple one at that. The very technology that has polluted our planet can also provide us with the know-how to undo past mistakes and avoid similar ones in the future.

There is a tremendous body of research on the processes and chemicals that weaken the body and allow disease to take hold, as well as the role that nutrients play in fortifying the body against disease or even turning back the process of disease. We can harness that knowledge to counter both environmental assaults and genetic weaknesses.

Because I have satellite practices in Japan and Brazil in addition to The Salerno Center in New York, I have the opportunity to compare a culture that has been industrialized for three-quarters of a century with ones that, until recently, were primarily rural. All too many of my foreign patients now suffer from the same diseases that have plagued Americans for decades, strongly suggesting environmental influences.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Top Ten Questions About Fight Fat With Fat Diet

1. How is the Fight Fat with Fat Diet different from Atkins?

2. Can I eat in a restaurant?

3. What can I eat on the road, at the office, or on the run?

4. Vegetables are not in the detox phase. Is this really healthy?

5. Where can I find appropriate food?

6. Will I ever be able to eat a piece of cake?

7. How do I balance preparing my special foods with what I need to fix for my partner and children?

8. How much weight can I expect to lose?

9. When do I go off the diet?

10. Tell me one more time. Why should I eat fat?

Introduction