I’ve been following the Eat To Win program for over 15 years with great success and have always recommended it to all of my personal training clients.  It’s kind of like mandatory reading for them once they start working with me. 

Robert Haas, M.S., a graduate of Florida State University with an advanced degree in Nutrition, and a client list that includes Lance Armstrong, Martina Navratilova, Cher, and many more, bases his work on credible research in the nutrition field, and not fads.  He’s made several additions throughout the years by combining the best of the Asian culture and the Mediterranean culture to coin the term, “MediterrAsian Diet.”  It’s the best program I’ve come across and the tastiest.  You can’t go wrong with it.

Here’s an article by Haas from the FitnessRx website which introduces the main concepts of the program:

The MediterrAsian Diet Series

      This plan gives you a cutting-edge 21st century nutritional strategy based on a centuries-old way of eating that has withstood the test of time in promoting lifelong slimness, perfect health and longevity. The MediterrAsian Diet is a hybrid diet that contains the most powerful nutritional elements of the world’s two healthiest diets, the Mediterranean and Asian diets. 
      The MediterrAsian Diet provides the optimum ratio of protein, fat and carbohydrate foods to promote perfect health and fitness. The diet emphasizes such protein-rich foods as salmon, swordfish, tuna and legumes (including soybeans and soy foods and beverages). It focuses on low-carbohydrate vegetables and such healthy fats and oils as olive oil, canola oil, soy mayonnaise and omega-3, linoleic and linolenic fatty acids.
      As vital as these health protein sources are, the real nutritional power of The MediterrAsian Diet derives from its exceptionally dense phytonutrient content. The foods and food groups provide the highest concentration of phytonutrients for the fewest calories. One secret to attaining perfect health and fitness is to consume the most nutrition for the least calories. A low-calorie, phytonutrient-dense diet is the fast track to a long and healthy life.

Phytonutrient Power
      Phytonutrients give tomatoes their beautiful red color and oranges, grapefruits and limes their wonderful citrus-like flavor. Phytonutrients give garlic and onions their characteristic aroma and taste and they make red wine red, blueberries blue and green beans green.
      Great chefs use phytonutrient-rich foods to add vibrant colors and mouth-watering flavors to their dishes. But, phytonutrients can do far more than please the eye and palate— they can help prevent and even reverse life-threatening diseases.
      Technically, phytonutrients are not vitamins, which prevent deficiency diseases such as beriberi (a nerve disease caused by lack of vitamin B1) and scurvy (a connective tissue disease due to lack of vitamin C). But phytonutrients, found exclusively in vegetables, fruits and herbs, pack the power to defeat the degenerative diseases that stalk most people— cancer, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and osteoporosis. This is why I call phytonutrients industrial-strength vitamins (see Table 2).       This month, I want to tell you about a powerful class of phytonutrients found in soy foods and beverages, which play an important role sin The MediterrAsian Diet. Use The MediterrAsian Diet Food Guide Pyramid (Table 1) and The Mediterrasian Diet Guidelines (Table 4) to help design an eating plan that contains soy products suited to your food preferences.

The MediterrAsian Food Guide Pyramid
      Most of us are familiar with the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid— the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) idea of how Americans should structure their diets. It suffers from serious scientific flaws due mainly to the unseemly influence of special interest groups representing the food industry. The MediterrAsian Food Guide Pyramid represents a radical departure from the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid because it:
 Replaces red meat, pork and fowl with soy- and other plant-based meat analogs and seafood rich in omega-3 fats
 Replaces grains and cereals with carotenoid- and cruciferous-rich vegetables as the pyramid foundation
 Limits added fats primarily to monounsaturated oils and omega-3 fats
 Limits dairy foods (optional) to small amounts of skim milk and fermented skim milk products

Table 1. The MediterrAsian Diet Food Guide Pyramid

Table 2. PHYTONUTRIENTS IN THE MEDITERRASIAN DIET

Soy Power
      Soy contains phytonutrients known as isoflavones and other phytoestrogens. These compounds are also found in peanuts, dried beans, split peas, lentils, green beans and garbanzo beans (chic peas).
      Epidemiological studies (studies of the factors leading to the occurrence of disease among free-living populations) reinforce these findings and suggest soy may help reduce rates of other cancers, in addition to those of the breast. And these studies suggest that soy is an important factor in the healthfulness of traditional Asian diets. 
      The phytonutrients in soy and other legumes can prevent a cancer-promoting process called angiogenesis— the process by which the body creates new blood vessels. Recently, cancer experts have discovered that soy contains powerful anti-angiogenesis compounds that can halt the enzymes used by cancer cells to trigger the growth of blood vessels in almost all tumors found in laboratory animals. Deprived of their food supply, many tumors quickly shrink and, in some cases, disappeared entirely. 
      Soy phytonutrients also help prevent cardiovascular disease. A recent study by a team of researchers at the Hirosaki University School of Medicine in Japan provides an additional explanation for how soy phytonutrients do this. University researchers discovered that when they fed rabbits soy milk, their LDL-cholesterol oxidation was dramatically suppressed. LDL oxidation enables the cells that line the arteries to take up cholesterol, leading to plaque formation and ultimately, heart attacks, strokes and impotence. 
      LDL oxidation may be more important for lowering heart disease risk as lowering blood cholesterol levels themselves. Many scientists agree that oxidized LDL-cholesterol can damage the delicate artery lining that leads to blockage. There is now sufficient evidence to suggest that if even if your cholesterol level is high, you can reduce it substantially by eating just two to three servings of soy foods a day (about 25 to 45 grams of soy protein), or one to two servings of a concentrated soy beverage.

How Much Soy Do You Need?
      The average per capita dietary intake of the main soy isoflavone, genistein, in the U.S. is only one to three milligrams per day. Some health experts recommend keeping total soy isoflavone intake to no more than 40-80 milligrams a day. Unless you have cancer or you’ve been advised otherwise by your own physician, I believe this is a prudent recommendation for all healthy adults.
      Native Japanese, who enjoy some of the lowest rates of breast and prostate cancer in the world, consume about 40-80 milligrams of isoflavones each day, almost entirely derived from soy. When investigators in a recent study gave a daily dose of 60 grams of soy protein (which contained between 45-70 milligrams of isoflavones) to premenopausal women, it significantly decreased follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone levels and increased menstrual cycle length. Cancer experts believe that translates into a reduced risk of breast, ovarian and endometrial cancers.
      Soy also protects against colon cancer by blocking the carcinogenic effect of secondary bile acids. Primary bile acids are made in the liver and stored in the gallbladder to aid in fat digestion. Secondary bile acids (primary bile acids transformed by normal bacteria in the gut) have been implicated as colon tumor promoters. High-fat diets promote colon cancer by increasing the amount of secondary bile acids in the colon, whereas the phytonutrients in soy foods protect against colon cancer by reducing high levels of secondary bile acids.  
      Estrogen and estrogen-derived hormones can increase cancer risk by binding to breast cells and stimulating unchecked growth that leads to tumor formation. Soy and other plant isoflavones are similar in structure to human estrogen, so they can also attach to the hormone receptors, effectively blocking the cancer-causing effects of estrogen-related compounds. Since isoflavones are very weak estrogen-like compounds, they don’t have the deadly effect that human estrogens do. The most widely used drug in breast-cancer treatment, tamoxifen, works in a similar way. 
      Soy foods are among the richest sources of isoflavones. In a recent clinical study testing the effect of soy against cancer, researchers demonstrated that ordinary soy foods contain enough isoflavones to exert a marked and favorable influence on reproductive hormone levels. Researchers fed a group of women 60 grams of textured vegetable protein (the soy-based meat analog used in many brands of soy burgers) daily and observed what happened to their menstrual cycles. After four weeks, the time between their cycles increased two to five days. Longer menstrual cycles mean a lower lifelong exposure to estrogen and it’s more potent sister hormone, estradiol, which in turn lowers cancer risk. Oriental-style fermented soy foods, such as miso and tempeh, seem to have the same estrogen-blunting effect, although the safety of fermented soy foods has been called into question by recent research.

Types of Soy Foods
      Soy foods are separated into non-fermented and fermented products. Non-fermented products include soybeans, soy nuts, soy sprouts, soy flour, soy milk, okara and tofu. Fermented products include tempeh, miso, soy sauces, natto and fermented tofu. Soy milk is used to make tofu, soy yogurt and soy-based cheeses. Tempeh is a meat alternative with a unique flavor and texture. Miso is a fermented white to brown soybean paste often used in combination with wheat, barley or rice as a soup base.

Table 3. Foods Derived from the Soybean