I quite enjoy reading and often read books about nutrition so I figured I’d start posting a review or two on my site. I picked up this book, Skinny Bastard by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, from my local library after hearing UFC fighter Jon Fitch recommend it in an online video.

Supposedly this is a straight shooting book aimed at men and getting them to clean up their diet after the success of Skinny Bitch by the same authors, unfortunately it’s nothing more than a mixture of vegan propaganda, half truths and outright lies.

Some examples, the authors claim that we simply aren’t designed to eat meat because we have alkaline saliva and have lower levels of hydrochloric acid in our stomach when compared to carnivores like lions or tigers, therefore we must be designed to be and descended from vegetarians. Never once do the thought that lions and tigers are exclusive carnivores (eat nothing but meat) while we are omnivores eating meat and plants. Then again, this wouldn’t fit their agenda and narrow world view so they construct this false dichotomy.

An entire section is devoted to aspartame, the artificial sweetener found in Equal and Nutri-Sweet, and how it’s linked to various diseases. Unfortunately most of that information is pulled from a hoax email. Then they also make the claim that aspartame is metabolised into methanol, a deadly poison. This claim is in fact true, however the metabolism of natural substances like ascorbic acid, vitamin C, produces more methanol and our bodies are quite well equipped to deal with it.

The authors also seem to misunderstand many basic concepts. The define the pasteurization of milk as “boiling the hell of out it”, which is blatantly false. Pasteurization is heating milk to a certain temperature (below boiling point as this causes the proteins to denature), then rapidly cooling it, killing harmful bacteria. This process does remove some beneficial proteins and enzymes but protects us against nasties like Lysteria.

Finally an overarching theme of the book seems to be that everyone in the production of food is motivated entirely by money and therefore untrustworthy. Logically this follows that anyone motivated by money is untrustworthy and with that I’d like to ask the authors how much they got paid for this book, because their reasoning clearly applies to them too.

In summary, this book is nothing short of vegan propaganda and will tell you nothing about losing weight. In Defense Of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilema and Good Calorie, Bad Calorie are far better books on nutrition and actually contain real factual information.