Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A new idea
Perricone's basic idea is that you can rejuvenate your skin more from the inside than the outside. In other words, the best way to keep your skin looking young and healthy is through diet, eating the healthful foods, and avoiding the bad ones, rather than by putting on lots of expensive creams and lotions. I like this idea since there are lots of other reasons why you should eat a healthier, low-fat diet anyway--such as keeping your heart and blood vessels and other organs healthy, keeping your weight down, and so on. Avoiding high-fat, high-calorie foods and maintaining a healthier diet, exercising, and perhaps avoiding stress (I know, hard to do these days) are still the best way we know to live a long, happy, healthy life, so why not apply the same principles to your skin?I would like see some other scientific evidence on the effectiveness of diet in controlling skin aging, and especially on some of the more controversial aspects of Perricone's nutritional theories. For example, he recommends avoiding carrots, long considered healthy because of their containing beta-carotenes and other anti-oxidants, because of their high glycemic index. Fruit, although high in anti-oxidants, also fall into this high-glycemic category, producing an insulin spike from the pancreas, which is bad because you will store fats rather than burn them. My understanding on this was that you should prefer foods containing monosaccarides such as galactose and glucose, rather than disaccharides such as sucrose, because sucrose was hard on the pancreas and caused insulin spikes, but the simpler sugars didn't, being digested and broken down more gradually over time. ... I found his disussion of why you should eat wild salmon as opposed to farm-raised salmon interesting, but again, I'd like to see more evidence on this. I found his recommendation that you should avoid carbs such as cereals and breads interesting ... Finally, there is now evidence that saturated fats and oils such as cocoanut oil, long-considered a real bad guy, don't produce oxidants and free radicals in the body, but that polyunsaturated fats and oils do. Perricone also includes a lot information on vitamins and minerals, which I found to be more helpful and less controversial than his other nutritional recommendations. Altogether, an interesting book with a different slant on skin aging and nutrition in general, but again, I'd like to see more independent evidence on some of the more controversial aspects of his nutritional ideas. His recommendations on exercise, vitamins, and keeping your weight down are hard to fault, however, and overall, I found the book's advice and message to be positive even if I remain somewhat sceptical on some of his nutritional theories.
Rating: - Dermatologist's theories on health and aging
Dr. Perricone offers some interesting new insights into health, particularly diet and aging, and pulls them together with other established/current theories to provide a more complete view. Perricone recently featured in a PBS special where he discussed his ideas in some detail. Percicone's chief insight seems to be the role of inflammation in disease and aging. Much of approach relates to avoiding and reducing inflammation. Fats - fish oil in particular are considered (the benefits of fish oil is nothing new of course) - and sugars (and their effect on insulin, again not new) get special attention. Being a dermatologist, the author is also an enthusiast for the topical application of medicines (there are apparently advantages in some cases in terms of increased effect and decreased side-effects). This is something fairly new, applying medicines directly to the skin has been around a long time but has only recently recieved much serious consideration, and Perricone sees this as something which will be used far more widely in the future, backed up by studies.
Rating:  - The Perricone Prescription
Perricone (The Wrinkle Cure), a professor of dermatology at Yale Medical School, believes that relatively simple changes in eating can effect dramatic changes in physical appearance and well-being. He has created a month-long program broken up into daily menus as well as a more restrictive three-day regimen designed to produce immediate results. Perricone's guiding principle, which he explains in some depth, is to reduce inflammation at the cellular level, which, he believes, causes the skin to age and is also linked to degenerative disease. Perricone suggests that protein and some fat is essential for everyone. He is particularly keen on the benefits of fish. Certain foods high in carbohydrates cereals, breads, bananas are taboo in this plan because of their high glycemic index; they cause a spike in blood sugar and prompt the body's insulin response, which stores rather than burns fat and causes inflammation. Perricone also recommends an exercise regimen, and nearly a third of the book is devoted to a discussion of antioxidants, vitamin supplements and creams. Some may question his nutritional theories, and others may find the diet difficult to stick to, with its almost total restriction of starchy foods. Still, Perricone is a proponent of Barry Sears's The Zone, and readers who have followed that book and Perricone's own bestselling earlier volume will probably appreciate this one. (Aug.) Forecast: Given the author's track record with his previous book, there's little doubt that this one will hit the lists especially with the help of media attention and the summer publication, when many people are suffering from the effects of too much sun.
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