COOKING ON THE LIGHT SIDE

Ho’s (Eat Your Way to Lighter Skin, 2008) new diet cookbook presents recipes designed to improve health and the vitality of the skin.

The book is a mix of medical precepts, appealing photography and recipes, the last of which are fairly standard diet fare but are also quite tasty, with both vegetarian and nonvegetarian options. A lengthy opener expresses Ho’s research in the fields of diet and rejuvenating the skin, but mostly falls back on the usual sorts of advice one finds in low-fat cookbooks (eat mostly raw foods, don’t add more than one fat to a dish, etc.). Ho dedicates significant sections of the book to colorful photos of various vegetables and other foods that contain large amounts of the author’s wonder element—sulfur. She claims that sulfur is the secret to having a better life and better body, with particular emphasis on the skin. Once the book lays the groundwork for its sulfur-rich strategy, it moves into the recipes, which are delicious and have very low calorie counts. In addition, Ho’s suggestions of possible diets featuring her recipes make for well-balanced meals. The ingredients in the various recipes occasionally skew toward the obscure, but for the most part they’re items that should be available in any supermarket or already present in most kitchens. In particular, Ho’s ideas for breakfast use fruit in intriguing ways and will make for nice supplements to most chefs’ breakfast preparations. The material on rejuvenating the skin and the benefits of sulfur weaves its way through the entire book, but the recipes themselves stand out from the work’s more prosaic trappings.

A beautifully designed book that combines Ho’s sulfur diet suggestions with medical science, and offers plenty of recipes for readers to add to their cooking repertoire.