Dr. Perricone is a Gasbag -Roger Mason

For those of you who watch public access TV you may have seen Dr. Nicholas Perricone pontificating about healthy diet. It is amazing someone who knows so little about health can be so financially successful. Surely you heard of his best selling book The Wrinkle Cure. What a crock! Little of what he says or writes makes any sense. He keeps babbling about how unhealthy "no-fat diets" are. What no-fat diets? Who has ever heard of a “no-fat” diet? He promotes the myth that olive oil is somehow "good" for you. so you can eat all you want. He actually suggests eating more "good fats" so we'll be slimmer and burn off fat better! I didn't make that up folks. His logic is something to behold isn't it? Steamed brown rice has about 8% fat calories, and plain boiled oatmeal made with water has about 14%. Instead of advising people to eat a 1,000 mg of flax oil daily to get the omega-3 fatty acids they need he wants you to eat a lot of salmon. Really good advice there Nick. We'll just have a half pound slab of salmon every day. 
 
He just loves that glycemic index, and  never once recommends whole grains. Please read the articles on the glycemic index in the library to see how silly it is. Whole grains are literally the staff of life, but he doesn't  eat any. Instead he wants you to eat huge amounts of protein- i.e. poultry, meat, and egg whites. Just ignore the fact that eggs and poultry are two of the most prominent allergenic foods known. He says men need 80 grams of protein a day and women need about 60. This is simply wrong. He feels many Americans are somehow "protein deficient"! Folks, Americans eat twice the calories they need and TWICE the protein they need. This is a major reason we suffer from so many horrible diseases.  
 
The healthiest diet in the world is based on the Asian diet, yet he promotes the Mediterranean diet (he's Italian). Just put lots of olive oil on your food, and eat five times a day. Seriously, he actually says this. He criticizes people who only eat one or two meals a day, and tells them to eat five instead. Seems Nick doesn't realize Americans already eat twice what they need, and calorie restriction is THE most effective way to extend lifespan.  
 
He promotes that drink-as-much-water-as-you-can myth as well. Drink lots of water even when you're not thirsty. Now, what kind of sense does that make? Your body has a true sense of thirst (unlike hunger). When you need water you darn well know it. Drink only when thirsty is the obvious thing to do. Don't drink unless you're thirsty- listen to your body wisdom. Drinking all that water strains your kidneys. 

He knows every less about supplements than he does about diet. That doesn't stop him from preaching about that though.  He tells you to take four supplements a day.

Vitamin E, and he is very correct here. He wants you to take huge megadoses of vitamin C. This will just acidify your blood and make you sickly. We only need  60 mg of vitamin C every day. If you want to take a supplement do not take more than 250 mg. Megadoses of anything are bad for you including sex, sunshine, oxygen and anything else (again, please see the library articles). Next he recommends alpha lipoic acid, which is a wonderful supplement everyone over 40 should take. The problem is that he says to take a mere 50 mg. This simply isn't going to do it at all. 400 mg is the correct dose. Lastly, he want you to take DMAE. This enjoyed brief popularity almost 20 years ago, until people found out it simply didn't work. There is simply no science behind DMAE, no studies in the international literature. If DMAE had any benefits after all these decades the studies would be there and people would be taking it.

 
Now we come to his lipoic acid face cream for $70. You need less than 50 cents worth of lipoic acid to make a proper 4% cream, yet he wants to gouge people for $70. On top of that, he refuses to state the amount of lipoic acid in the cream! Go to his website and e-mail the company and ask them. They'll refuse to tell you how much. They won't tell you. For seventy bucks you don't even know how much is in there! Legally he can put one milligram in there. We stopped selling lipoic acid cream as it just isn't effective and many people find it irritating to their faces. 

Why is someone like this so popular and why does his book sell so well? That's the real question.