By Stanford Erickson

Want a silver bullet to grow your chiropractic practice?  Well, I don’t believe there is one — but being more useful to your patients concerning nutrition and diet is close to being one.

An estimated 50 million Americans will go on diets this year.

Also, an estimated 20 million Americans purchase some form of diet medication every year looking for a “magic bullet.”

Well, according to K.C. Craichy, author of the best-selling Super Health – 7 Golden Keys to Unlock Lifelong Vitality and his new book The Super Health Diet – The Last Diet You Will Ever Need, the magic diet bullet has not yet been produced —although a host of pharmaceutical companies have been working on it.

“Modern dietary thinking has been about the Law of Thermodynamics, which states that if a person eats 3,500 calories more than they burn, they will gain one pound of fat,” Craichy writes. But then he spends 444 pages explaining that weight gain and loss are much more complicated than that.

In the past, and perhaps currently, many MDs and DCs apparently were relying on the glycemic index, or GI, when suggesting diets for their patients. The GI index measures the effects of carbohydrates on blood sugar levels.

High GI carbohydrates breakdown quickly during digestion and release glucose rapidly in the bloodstreams. Carbohydrates with high GI include white bread, white rice, and corn flakes. Carbohydrates that breakdown more slowly, releasing glucose gradually into the bloodstream have a low GI. Most fruits, vegetables, whole grains and nuts have a low GI.

The misconception, Craichy writes, is that a low GI will lead to weight loss and a high GI will lead to weight gain. It’s more complicated than that.

Craichy serves on the Clinical Nutrition Review Board, the certifying body of the International and American Association of Clinical Nutrition. His early experience and education was in the finance and entrepreneurial side of the business, which led to health related ventures in the late 1980s. As a result of his wife’s health problems, Craichy embarked on a two decade journey of research that led to his founding and serving as the CEO Living Fuel Inc., which sells supplements that provide and enhance the more than 50 nutrients the body needs to ingest on average each day.

Craichy’s new book, The Super Health Diet – The Last Diet You Will Ever Need, not only provides information on weight

optimization and healthy aging that is well referenced with scientific studies, but it provides a wonderful  and what appears to be a comprehensive review of the various diet programs being offered to the public augmented with Craichy’s very candid comments. It can be a helpful encyclopedia of diet fads, discussion of what the diet fads can do or promises to do, and Craichy’s observations on the effectiveness of the diet.

For example: He discusses "The Biggest Loser," the weight-loss program made popular by NBC. The diet/exercise regimen is a 12-week program developed by obesity clinicians and dieticians at Tufts University.

“It has a 4-3-2-1 pyramid (four servings of fruits and vegetables; three of lean protein, two of whole grains; and one “extra’ of sweets, oils, or fats of about 200 calories),” writes Craichy. “You’ll be eating small, frequent meals (three meals a day and three snacks) with fiber and protein full fullness. The goal is to decrease blood pressure, lower cholesterol, become strong, and have more energy.”

In commenting of "The Biggest Loser," Craichy writes that “it seems to ignore the increased protein requirements of a low-calorie diet and the need for nutrient density, and does not emphasize supplementation.”

A diet needs to promote total health in addition to weight loss, Craichy writes.

In the second part of Craichy’s book he expounds of the Four Corners of Superfood Nutrition, which is his  own  comprehensive program on how to not just diet but optimize the body’s weight, feed our bodies to increase energy and slow down the aging process. Craichy discusses the dynamic role of proteins in weight loss, meal frequency (he is skeptical of the regimes calling for six meals per day), eating speed, and exercise. He ends the book by providing Seven Golden Keys to Weight Optimization and Super Health, which include dealing with stress and sleep.

Greater authorities than I recommend the book. “K.C. Craichy has written the most remarkable book of the twenty-first century,” says Richard Lippman, MD, 1996 nominee for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. “The reader will gain more information from K.C.’s book than from five other nutrition books currently available on Amazon.”

The Super Health Diet – The Last Diet You will Ever Need can be obtained for $24.95 by going to the website www.LivingFuel.com.

Stanford Erickson is the editorial director of Chiropractic Economics.