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DIET AGAINST DISEASE: A New Plan for Safe and Healthy Eating by Alice A. & Frances Tenenbaum Martin Kirkus Star

DIET AGAINST DISEASE: A New Plan for Safe and Healthy Eating

By

Pub Date: Sept. 30th, 1980
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

A creative adaptation of the recommendations of the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs into a specfic program for changing eating habits. The Committee set out distinct dietary goals--avoid overweight, increase consumption of complex carbohydrates and natural sugars, decrease consumption of fats, cholesterol, and sodium--with the overall aim of reducing diet as a risk factor in developing disease. Besides discussing the individual goals, the authors provide a diet for reaching them--based generally on eating as little processed food as possible and cutting down on red meat. Advice on selecting, preparing, and storing food is realistic: today we can either peel an apple and lose the fiber in the skin, the authors note, or eat it as it is and get a mouthful of wax. Additives, they suggest, should be divided between those necessary for safe storage and those merely used for cosmeticizing the product. And why, they ask, is a food problem so often solved by adding another chemical, rather than by a limit to processing--as in the addition of wood fiber to Kellogg's All-Bran to make it a ""natural food-fiber cereal""? The recipes and cooking instructions are easy to follow, and meet readers' needs for convenience, with basic mixes to prepare ahead and the like. Gaps are acknowledged (there are Recommended Daily Allowances for only seven of the many minerals we need; not enough is known about the others yet), but what is known is clearly set forth. The result is a reliable, up-to-date guide to today's body of nutritional knowledge.