THE NATURAL HEALING COOKBOOK

The idea is not simply to avoid what is bad, but to maximize what is good."" Thus Brinklin and Claessens go well beyond the low-salt, low-saturated fat approach of other ""new nutrition"" cookbooks to promote garlic, fish, oil, broccoli, yogurt, whole grains, and other specific foods, vitamins, and minerals as anti-heart disease, anti-cancer, anti-deafness, anti-headache, anti-what-have-you agents. This will come as no surprise to readers of Prevention magazine, which Bricklin edits. He takes pains here to avoid a crackpot image, pushing natural foods, not pills, warning readers that a book does not replace medical consultation, and citing, to support his recommendations, a provocative plethora of studies from respectable establishment sources. To be sure, only supporting studies are selected, and readers get no sense of the tenuous or controversial nature of some of the conclusions. But at worst the nutritional unorthodoxies spawn no bizarre health-threatening diets, and the culinary unorthodoxies are mere eclectic oddities on the order of tofu on pizza, kelp powder in minestrone, and tamari in chile beans with cornbread. The tamari in fact is ubiquitous here, Bricklin and Claessens' answer to their strict ""no-salt"" rule. (To be fair, tamari does not turn up in those recipes especially marked for blood pressure patients.) So, too, with that old health-food staple, blackstrap molasses (or, less often, honey), which turns up in place of sugar--often in recipes that need no sweetener at all. It might be argued that the same good foods are at least as ""natural"" in their authentic ethnic contexts. Still, for Bricklin's followers and other adherents of alternative cuisine, a good dose of brussels sprouts with their agar-agar and brewers' yeast can't hurt.