Do you, like
most Americans, have a love—hate relationship with food? You love sizzling
steaks and pizzas dripping with gooey cheese, but occasionally you’re filled
with remorse. Then you avoid everything but salads and exercise. After you lose
a couple of pounds, you return to your old routine and regain the weight. This
is sometimes called yo-yo dieting.
Funny? Sad and
pathetic? Annoying, especially to me, a former professor of nutrition. Maybe,
that’s why I wrote Murder…A New Way to Lose Weight.
Let me tell you
a little about my new medical mystery.
Dieting
is hard. So is fitting into a new job where you aren’t wanted. Linda Almquist
is trying to do both as she investigates allegations against two diet doctors
that they are taking shortcuts in their current clinical trail and endangering
their patients. When she discovers one of them dead, the police suspect the
other diet doctor. Maybe they’re wrong. The murders might be related to
something in the past – something involving her boss the Dean.
One
subplot in this novel is Linda’s efforts to lose weight. There are many insidious threats to her weight loss plans (i.e. tempting
high-fat foods typical of New Mexican cuisine, vending machines with junk food,
and humongous servings in most restaurants).
As
a nutritionist, I also wanted to tell readers about a hot new area of research—gut bacteria. Scientists have found the microflora (bacteria) in the
gut change with weight loss. Researchers hypothesize they may be able to help
patients increase weight loss and keep weight off by altering their gut
bacteria. That’s why my diet doctors are studying the gut bacteria of their
obese patients in a clinical trail. However, I was careful to not make false
promises. (I guess I wouldn’t be good on TV infomercials.)
Please note the
diet doctors in Murder…A Way to Lose Weight do not resemble any researchers in
the field, but they do have the characteristics of several overly ambitious
researchers, who have had ethical lapses.
Murder… A Way to Lose Weight (paperback &
Kindle) is available from Amazon (http://amzn.com/1610092392).
