http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20619795-2,00.html
FEDERAL Minister Julie Bishop
has told Australians they have "no excuse" for being fat at the launch of a new version of the controversial CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet.
The education minister welcomed the new book, saying there was now "no excuse" for Australians not to exercise regularly and eat well.
She quoted worrying statistics suggesting that half of adult Australians did not get enough physical exercise and one in six were considered overweight.
Lack of physical activity caused about 8000 preventable deaths and added $400 million to the health budget each year, the minister added.
"Sixty per cent of an adult population in a country like Australia with
magnificent weather* and the opportunity to be outdoors and be physically fit is just not acceptable," she said.
The authors of the best-selling CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet said they had tackled criticism of the science behind the high-protein diet head-on in the follow-up volume.
Launching the new book in Sydney, Dr Manny Noakes and Dr Peter Clifton said they had not changed the principles of the diet in response to complaints that it advocates eating too much meat.
The first volume has sold over 700,000 copies, knocking both Harry Potter's adventures and The Da Vinci Code off the top of the bestseller list.
Dr Noakes and Dr Clifton, both from the CSIRO's Human Nutrition section, said the second book's combination of a high protein diet and exercise plans would help tackle Australia's obesity crisis.
Dr Clifton painted a bleak picture of the looming health crisis facing Australia.
A child born in 2002 had between a 30 and 50 per cent chance of developing diabetes, which was associated with further problems like kidney disease, he said.
He said the book was "a small step in the right direction" but warned that the challenges facing Australia were "pretty enormous".
The original CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet book met with criticism, including an editorial in the prestigious science journal Nature which said marketing the diet as scientifically proven was "decidedly unsavoury".
Dr Noakes said the new volume, which includes 80 new recipes and a 12-week eating plan, explained the controversy about how much red meat is good for you.
If you exercise regularly, and eat plenty of fruit, vegetables and wholegrains, the risks associated with eating red meat are much lower, she said.
"We've really confronted the controversy head-on in book two and tried to explain it... I don't think people really did understand what it was about."
