The Liberation Diet is probably a bit of a more obscure book from the Nutrition genre. I
I read the book a few years ago when my mom sent me a copy, but decided to reread. I decided to reread it for a two reasons. The first was that I wanted to do a review on it and wanted to refresh my memory. The second and more selfish reason is that I am cleaning out my basement and wanted to decide if it was worth keeping.
So, as just as I remembered it, the book is full of good information. It does go over some things that are covered in other real food nutrition books- good information, but is redundant. What this book does bring to the table is the history of Crisco, and how it affected the food industry. The TL:DR is that Crisco started out as crystallized cottonseed oil. Crystallized cottonseed oil was used for candles, but then came electricity. So what did they do? Package it as food and slap false health claims on it. Sound familiar?
It also talks about a booklet that circulated through England in the 1860s called Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public. This booklet talks about how one fat undertaker lost lots of weight by changing his diet from lots of carbohydrates to a more meat based diet. It’s a good story, and one that seems to have gotten lost. It’s worth a google.
The book also goes over the importance of good salt, food additives, Weston A. Price, raw milk, and vitamins and minerals. This is the more redundant information that most natural foods/whole foods/real foods nutrition books will go over.
The nice thing about this book is that at the end of each chapter, the author highlights the main bullet points of each chapter. It’s nice to see it broken down that way. They also do a good job encouraging people to make realistic goals. As someone who can be highly unrealistic in the expectations I set for myself, it’s nice to see.
The recipes section of the book is very lackluster. Probably the best thing about it is that it has suggested meal plans. For people that haven’t really thought about meal planning, this is probably extremely helpful. That aside, most of the recipes look very uninspiring. The only recipe I ever tried was the Blended Dressing (salad dressing) recipe because I am always looking for good salad dressing recipes.
All in all, I will probably hold onto the book. If I were just getting into eating a real food diet or ketogenic diet, this would not be the first book I would buy. If you can find it at the library or on sale, it would be worth it.
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