The Plain Dealer

Book cuts to chase on weight-loss claims

By Jenny Staletovich

Special to The Plain Dealer

The Fat-Free Truth book tells us more about fitness fads and new science than the kind of fat-free dieting most of us associate with the phrase.

Neporent, a fitness columnist for iVillage and personal trainer, and

Schlosberg, a humorist who also does fitness books, team up for their third collaboration in what turns out to be a handy reference book. Rather than advocate certain diets or workout programs, the two set out to unravel all the trends and research behind eating and exercising.

What they've created is a simple, well-documented guide.

Organized in a question-and-answer format, the book covers big issues like weight loss and strength training. But it also throws in interesting but completely useless trivia, like obesity rates worldwide.

For instance, Samoa holds the distinction of having the fattest citizens while China, not surprisingly, clocks in with the skinniest. Despite french fries, the French are among the thinnest — along with Swiss women — while Americans remain skinnier than Canadians but fatter than Japanese.

That, obviously, is not what makes the book worth reading. Rather, it's the research the pair toss in, succinctly indexed at the end of the book. They explain specifically the Body Mass Index, which has emerged as the hot new critical measure of size, rather than weight, and tell us why it's not

always a good tool. They also delve into nutrition issues such as fast food and the notion that it can be addictive.

In fact, they tell us, a trial at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine

showed that rats fed a diet similar to a typical fast-food meal were less able to respond to the hormone that regulates eating. When they subsequently were put on a diet to lose the weight gained from all that fast-food junk, their wacky hormones told them they might be starving and caused them to overeat.

So if you're wondering why your knees make a clicking sound when you exercise, need to know the difference between barbells and dumbbells, or are asking whether the Atkins diet can really work and still be healthy, this is the book for you.