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FOOD COP by Yolanda Bergman

FOOD COP

Yolanda, Tell Us What to Eat!

by Yolanda Bergman with Daryn Eller

Pub Date: July 15th, 1991
ISBN: 0-553-07337-0
Publisher: Bantam

Los Angeles diet counselor to the stars, Bergman supplies her clients (Carrie Fisher; Paul Stanley of KISS, etc.) with advice, admonishment, and her own line of fat-free dishes. She admits that she's not a nutritionist, and that shows in occasional slips here, most notably in her persistent assumption that bread is fattening. But mostly her recommendations are in line with current thinking, and she makes much of the popular ploy of not counting calories but instead limiting or all but eliminating fats. Another emphasis of Bergman's is that occasional indulgences are okay; she advises planning for them by stocking up on low-calorie versions of your particular junk-food weakness. Her recipes, which make up a small part of the book, are for pasta, fish, and poultry main dishes that employ prepared seasoning mixes, flakes, and powders; apparently this is how her clients cook, if they do. Since they also eat out a lot, there's a chapter on ordering to suit the diet; this and other chapters, on topics from reading labels to feeding kids, have some useful tips mixed in with chatty if not long-winded pep talks and references to her experiences with clients. Whether this approach can work in print as it does in person might be questioned, but no doubt Bergman's glamorous associations and tolerant policing will have some appeal.