Pierre Dukan - Six Months to Change the World: Learn the importance of eating right during the last six months of your pregnancy to protect your childs health

I ve worked on many projects in my life, but the one Im presenting to you here is without a doubt the most exciting, meaningful and consequential, for me and for my readers alike.

It is my deepest hope that the plan found in this book will help stop the spread of an epidemic that causes immense amounts of suffering. This hope is the motivation for every page and every word.

CHANGING THE WORLD. Its a bold objective, intended to create a stir. Its meant to draw attention to a fact that is all too often covered up or ignored. Humanity today those now living and the generations that will follow us faces a grave threat. Statistics from around the world show that this danger has been in our midst for two generations now. In the post-war year, overweight persons numbered in the hundreds of millions; since then, the number has skyrocketed to 2 billion. The problem has a wider reach than ever before.

The crisis of excess weight, obesity and diabetes has long been treated as a somewhat trivial issue. This has been due sometimes to short-sightedness, and sometimes to complicity. But we now know that weight problems are a true scourge. They pollute, impair and otherwise affect the life and well-being of one out of two adults in the West, directly or indirectly leading to the death of 75 million people.

Changing the entire world is the goal, because almost no country has been able to stop the scourge.

SIX MONTHS: Does this mean that the world will be vastly different just six months after the plan is published? No. What it means is that:

if every pregnant woman understands the idea that what she eats during her pregnancy can radically change the life of her child, and makes decisions accordingly;

if she understands and accepts that many of the foods shes now consuming are tolerable for her but may not be tolerated by her unborn child; and

if the plan laid out in this book reaches these women, is properly understood and appeals to their common sense and their keen maternal instincts,

then I believe the plan could truly change the world in terms of the coming generation the one that will follow the two generations that have borne this scourge.

SIX MONTHS: This refers to the final six months of pregnancy, particularly the fourth and fifth months sixty crucial days when the babys pancreas develops and begins secreting insulin.

SIX MONTHS in which its well worth considering that the process for manufacturing a human infant was developed at a time when there were no:

bakeries

refined sugar

white flour

fizzy drinks

mass-produced breads

corn flakes

other industrially processed foods.

Nor was our massive selection of snack foods available not millions of years ago, nor when your grandmother was carrying your mother in her womb.

SIX MONTHS: A period during which a mother, origin of human life, prepares to give birth. A time when, influenced by maternal hormones, sensing instinctively what might pose a risk to her baby, she is capable of choosing to change her status from consumer to mother.

When I recommended to one of my patients, who was at the start of her pregnancy, that she follow this plan, she responded with a wonderful crystallisation of my thought. Basically, she said, youre asking me to eat for six months the way people ate in my grandmothers time.

Source: World Health Organization (WHO), Obesity and Diabetes, Fact Sheet #311, Epidemiological Survey, 2009 (All notes are from the author).

T he project that is the subject of this book developed slowly, and took shape later than I would have liked. Most of my energy during that period was taken up by a daily frontal attack on my patients problems with excess weight, obesity and diabetes.

Early on, I started moving away from the dogma that focused on calories. At the end of my ten years of medical studies, I became extremely frustrated as I discovered that what I had been taught was proving very ineffective.

I quickly formed a suspicion, one that never left me: that the calorie theory was based on an unfounded assumption; that not all calories were equal; and that what really mattered was the type of calorie, or the nutrient it carried.

In talking with my patients, I found that the vast majority gained weight from eating too many invasive carbohydrates (those that move with ease and enter the blood rapidly and at once).

Over time, I built a method, step by step, that eliminated these sugars during a relatively brief period of weight loss. The results of this method confirmed that excess weight was a condition that could be mastered by those who had the motivation to give up these sugars during the weight-loss phase.

I went on to share this method in books that were widely read, reaching readers all over the world.

Reaching millions of readers is quite a success, but a reader is not a patient. Nonetheless, if a reader has a powerful desire that comes from deep within if they have what I call DLW, Determination to Lose Weight that reader, book in hand, will succeed in shedding pounds, and often in maintaining their new weight.

But there are many whose motivation hasnt reached this level, who dont have a strong relationship with a doctor and who suffer from a wealth of misinformation. In the fight against excess weight, these individuals are simply outmatched.

Why is it so hard for them? There are two main reasons.

First, because people who gain weight do so because, despite their aversion to the extra pounds, they cant resist foods that make them fat. This is partly because lobbies for the industry built around sugar, white flour and foods based on these products in conjunction with the pharmaceutical industry are violently opposed to anything that could in any way threaten their prosperity.

From birth to the age of fifty, we are bombarded with pressure to eat industrially processed foods that cause us to gain weight. Then, from the age of fifty on, we try to protect our health with extremely expensive drugs for weight-related diseases. Its hard for regular people to grasp the enormous power of the major food producers, or the extent of their ties to the medical community and the media.

So are those who suffer from excess weight a lost cause? Absolutely not. I know from long experience that excess weight, obesity and even diabetes are treatable, even reversible. But success depends on the patient accepting the only effective treatment there is: diet. Any solutions that reject or ignore diet, offering nutritional balancing or just listening to your feelings instead, are illusions: they inspire wonderful dreams, but they lead nowhere.

To combat this powerlessness, Ive tried to avoid the usual obstacles and instead taken another path. In doing so, Ive constructed step by step, one element at a time the complete plan youll find in this book.

I came into the world around the same time as the obesity crisis. I was beginning my medical studies in a period when, to the dismay of health and medical institutions, the number of overweight people in France had reached 1 million. Later even as I practised nutrition with patients who showed on a daily basis that they were able to lose weight with relative ease I watched as the crisis turned into an epidemic. The numbers continued to rise with dizzying speed: 27 million French citizens were overweight. The phenomenon seemed universal, borderless. As I watched the developments closely, I was struck by a number of points that I observed but couldnt yet understand.