Tag Archive: Diets

Those of you who’ve been reading my posts for awhile might remember my critique of The China Study a couple of years back. Keeping in mind that my criticism was directed mostly at the book, not at the concepts it presented, I try to keep an open mind. In fact, here at home, the majority of what I eat tends to be vegetarian, often even vegan – and here and there a bit of seafood and chicken. We virtually never eat red meat at home, well, I don’t, sometimes on request I’ll cook it up for Henry. It isn’t an ethical commitment, it’s simply I tend to feel better without eating it – I’ll still indulge on occasion if we’re out and about, but it’s rarer and rarer.

Anyway, that book and another, which I’m going to get to today, led to viewing the movie Forks Over Knives – it’s not a movie that presents any particularly new information, but given that a large percentage of the population wouldn’t pick up a book of the genre, it’s a film that they might. Well, probably not unless it airs on television because let’s face it, the likelihood is that the only people who saw it were people already interested and quite possibly committed or thinking about a change in diet. What’s particularly noteworthy is that the movie is pretty much based on these two books and the work of the two authors, both of whom, though they quote each other’s work, and know each other, like to claim that they’re the only person really out there making an effort to change things. Book publicity I suppose.

What I really should do is just tell you to go read the other critique. Why? Because I could almost copy it here. Okay, there’s some different focus, the studies are different, this book is actually better written and a more interesting read, and, the author’s wife packs the last section with recipes. But, Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.’s Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The revolutionary scientifically proven, nutrition-based cure in many ways might as well be the same book.

Again with the bludgeoning, though at least here the good doctor swaps back and forth between the phrases “plant-based nutrition” and “plant-based diet” almost as fast as Mitt Romney can switch positions on an issue. He does go a step further than the vegan diet recommended by T. Colin Campbell, PhD – he goes for full on vegan plus – eliminating chocolate, nuts, avocados, and plant-based oils (though, strangely, after deriding all types of nuts in several places, other than walnuts, which he considers acceptable, the recipes in the book often make use of nut milks…). In fact, if one gets to the end, while not officially limited to it, the recommendations are so overwhelmingly restrictive that only the most dedicated would follow them – “It is helpful to keep breakfast and lunch simple – and nearly the same every day.” The breakfast recommendations were pretty much all variations on oatmeal made with fruit juice instead of water or milk, and the lunches were pretty much undressed green salads. Example dishes touted for dinnertime include black beans and rice that we could eat just as is, every single night, and apparently be perfectly happy about, or maybe the much touted bowl of boiled, unseasoned kale.

But back to some of the science. Thankfully, the book isn’t as loaded with numbers and graphs as the other one, part of what makes it easier to read. Instead, it’s basically chapter after chapter of personal anecdotes and those of the doctor’s patients who participated in his scientific study. Here’s, however, where I get all uppity about the numbers. You see, that revolutionary (as if no vegan before had ever suggested that a switch to the diet could be beneficial healthwise) scientifically proven study consisted of 24 people. Well, really 18 people because 6 of the folk who agreed to be in the study gave it up as a bad thing after a brief fling at it. There was no control group to compare against, the doc’s clinic decided that wasn’t in the budget. There was no accounting for any other life changes – in fact the doc specifically poo-poos the idea that exercise is all that important because he’s not familiar with any studies proving that exercise is good for heart disease. His statement, not mine. Yet, he notes, anecdotally, that all of his patients became more active and got into exercise – he considers it an after-effect of the diet and it’s cure, rather than an adjunct cause.

And while he studied those 18 folk over a long period, a couple of decades, his studies are based on self-reporting. Oh yes, he drew blood and did laboratory analyses, but he relied on the patients in his study to account for how well they stuck to the diet. And he’s quite sure they all did because they told him they did, and why would they have any reason to lie about it? Certainly not his admonition that anyone who reported straying from the diet would be dismissed from the study…. Strangely, in a moment of candor, he admits that he strays from the diet himself – claiming just once a year on New Year’s Eve when he binges out on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Sure, I buy that. Just once a year. But of course, none of the patients would do such a thing. Right?

To be honest, at the end of the book I think I’d be less likely to even consider a vegan diet than at the beginning, unless I was in the dire circumstances of one of his patients. Oh, did I forget to mention that they 18 folk who participated were all basically at death’s door, their regular docs had told them to put their affairs in order and go home and die. These were folk who had had multiple heart attacks, bypasses, were on major medications, and nothing was working, so perhaps, just perhaps, they had some impetus for doing something truly radical. Interestingly, he does go back and mention that twenty years on he followed up on those six folk who walked out on the study and one had died and five of them still had heart problems. Ummm, wait, these were people who were supposed to be all dead within minutes if they didn’t participate in the study. Right?

So, another diet book written to spout a philosophy that no doubt has some validity behind it, but isn’t really doing much of anything but lining the author’s pockets. If he was as truly committed to what he claims to be committed to as he says he is, he’d be putting the information out there for free.

Maybe I should take on critiquing one of the diet books at the other end of the spectrum – a little Paleo or South Beach or something of that sort… hmmm.

“Cooking Light is America’s recipe for healthy living, dedicated to helping readers eat better, feel better and look their best. Each issue celebrates light cuisine via more than 75 kitchen tested, beautifully photographed recipes. Our editorial focus is to provide fitness from a common sense angle as well as a reachable/user friendly exploration of delicious better-for-you food. Our mission is to be embraced by readers as a part of their daily rhythm; our goal is to help each individual reader keep a better lifestyle balance. (Eat smart. Be fit. Live well.)”

– Mission Statement from Cooking Light magazine

Through a very round-a-bout process (which took them from Alabama to New York to Oregon to California to Uruguay and then I picked them up there while visiting the friend who’d snagged them in California), I recently received a couple of cookbooks from the publishers of Cooking Light magazine with the intent on their and my part to give them a test drive and review. The two books are, I gather, collections of recipes that have been published over the years in the magazine, plus, perhaps some additional ones specifically for the books – I’m not sure, there’s no indication in either book one way or the other on the latter.

Let’s start with my “problem” with Cooking Light and just get it out of the way with, because on a practical level, it’s irrelevant. The recipes that the magazine and books offer up have always relied much more heavily than I would like on canned and jarred goods – particularly sauces – and frozen vegetables. That’s it. The reality of daily life, however, is that that’s a step up from how most people cook – which consists of mixing prepackaged ingredients together or heating up something premade and frozen, or more likely, giving it up as a bad move anyway and ordering out Chinese or picking up fast food drive-through. I realize Cooking Light is focused on the food aspects of things, but really, “cooking spray” instead of just a little rub of oil on something? Part of living healthy is keeping the environment healthy too.

While from my personal perspective, I’d much rather have a stalk of fresh broccoli sitting in my kitchen than a bag of cut, blanched and shocked florets sitting in the freezer, I have the skewed viewpoint of someone whose workplace is in the kitchen. It’s not the place I’m forced to head to after putting in an 8 hour day at the office, or running kids around to all their after school events, or whatever it is that takes up the majority of people’s lives day in and day out. I actually enjoy cutting up the broccoli and doing the whole process to get it ready. And, it doesn’t cut into my day.

Nine times out of ten I’d rather chop up tomatoes and onions and garlic and peppers and all the rest to make myself some salsa that will only keep in the refrigerator for a few days instead of a jarred one that is preservative laden and will last for months, or even, buying a fresh one made by someone else. But that’s my passion – most people just want to get dinner on the table without exhausting themselves. So in the end, on a practical level, I am content that the books and magazine push people to use some fresh ingredients and actually spend time learning how they go together.

I don’t use cookbooks as recipe books directly in the kitchen. By that I mean that it’s rare that I would ever have a cookbook sitting on the kitchen counter, open to a page, with, likely, something holding down each side of the book so it stayed open while I refer to it back and forth. It’s just not the way I cook, but that gets back to what I do for a living and how I approach it. So it took me a moment to realize that the design of this book as a ring binder had multiple positive things about it as opposed to just taking up extra space over a normally bound book. You can open it and the pages lay flat, you can remove a single page and just have that in the kitchen with you, you can add to it with additional pages if you want, though the last, with 700+ recipes already in the binder, might be a bit of overstuffing. It’s eminently practical.

Cooking Light: complete meals in minutes is a straightforward recipe book. There’s no text, no prose, no reasons given for any of the recipes. In the context of the magazine there would be reasons given for certain choices, here the assumption is, just trust us, we’ve done the work. And that’s fine. It’s like the laboratory workbook that accompanies the textbook – when you’re in the lab, in this case the kitchen, you don’t need all the extraneous detail. A bit is provided – at the bottom of each recipe is a nutritional analysis of the key things people on a healthy eating kick might be concerned about – calories, fat, protein and carbohydrate content, cholesterol, iron, sodium….

As to the implied purpose of the book, it’s hard to say – “complete meals” are certainly possible out of this book, it covers everything from appetizers to desserts – but what was missing for me were any kind of suggestions like “hey, if you’re making this here on page 273, it goes really well with such and such on page 419.” (Those are random numbers, I don’t necessarily think that you should pair Country Captain Chicken and Grilled Nectarines with Blue Cheese.) You still have to do the menu planning yourself and figure out what you already have around the house and what you need to buy. The recipes are well thought out, easy to follow, and each includes an estimation of how much time it will take to complete them, the “in minutes” part of the subtitle, and they’re pretty accurate – if you decide to go the route of fresh vegetables rather than frozen in some, you’ll add in the few minutes to prepare them, that’s about it.

I tried out a good handful of the recipes, more or less selected at random and all turned out tasty. None was complicated to make. Here and there I have some quibbles about the choices of ingredients – for example, Chicken Paprikash, a favorite dish, is traditionally made with sour cream – what was behind the decision to use whipping cream in the recipe which not only takes away that nice tartness, but doesn’t lower the calories, fat or cholesterol in the dish? Why not light cream, or half and half, or better yet, yogurt? No doubt there was some sort of explanation in the original magazine article, but it isn’t here in the book. And a few things are probably well-known to the average norteamericano homemaker but that I haven’t a clue what they contain – “1 16-ounce package frozen bell pepper stir-fry” – is that just bell peppers? Does that have other stuff in the mix? What is actually in a “24-ounce package refrigerated sour cream and chives mashed potatoes”? I didn’t even know they made such a thing and really wish I didn’t now – and of course, the pushing of particular brands – I assume they’re advertisers – is a little annoying, and probably irrelevant to anyone outside of the U.S.

Overall, if you’re looking for a good, solid recipe book with lots of quick (I think every dish is 30 minutes or less) and easy to make dishes that are healthier than that frozen pizza (really? you have one of those in your freezer?) or snagging takeout from some fast food joint, this is a great choice.

The second book from the same publishers I both like more and less than the first. The book itself – Cooking Light: way to cook vegetarian is a straightforward hardcover. Now that I’m enamored of the ring binder that is the first book, this one loses points, but only in comparison. On the other hand, it’s not just a recipe book. It’s a book to sit down and read, because it’s got some good material in there – so it gets those points back.

Many of the same things could be said about the recipes that are in the book – the ease, the frozen, canned and jarred thing, the advertiser pimping (do I really want to know what “1 12-ounce package meatless fat-free crumbles” are?). The recipes here are more of a mix, some simple and some more complicated, and they don’t have that helpful “in minutes” part for the harried homemaker. Many of them require a bit more planning, but it’s all well spelled out. Visually, it’s a quite beautiful book, with not just great photos of the dishes, but also step-by-step how to sections on various topics like making ricotta, preparing certain specialty vegetables and making omelets; sidebars that explain the differences between grains, tofus, tempehs, and many of the other things that a budding vegetarian might want to read about. It’s like a really cool, well illustrated “for Dummies” book. But better.

It falls down in a couple of places. I found myself searching the index with no luck for many of our current fall vegetables – cauliflower, brussels sprouts, parsnips and cabbage, somehow or other not one of these make it into the book, or at least aren’t listed – yet at the same time, it delves into things like celeriac, lemongrass, jicama and quinoa, with gusto. Even broccoli gets short shrift with only three recipes, two of which are variations on “in cheese sauce”. The focus seems to be on grain based dishes – whether the grains themselves in one guise or another, or things like pastas, sandwiches (or other similar dishes like bruschettas and pizzas), and a whole lotta stir-fries on rice. And why tout seitan as a great protein alternative and then only offer one page and two recipes using it while tofu warrants a 25 page section and tempeh, which is probably harder to find, a 10 pager with lots of recipe options each?

Although the index parses out the vegan recipes, and they’re marked in the text as well, there’s no explanation of the differences between vegetarian eating and a vegan lifestyle, or even that the latter isn’t, generally, just a diet. And even in some of the vegan marked dishes they use honey, which for the majority of vegans is a no-no.

Overall – visually a great book, and well, well worth it for the techniques and sidebars – some of which will likely clear up all sorts of mysteries for the kitchen novice, particularly someone exploring a vegetarian alternative, or who just wants to expand their repertoire of vegetable recipes. It’s not, as the subtitle asserts, “the complete visual guide to healthy vegetarian & vegan cooking” – it’s far from complete, but it would be an excellent library addition to anyone with those goals in mind.

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”

– E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

Buenos Aires – One of the things I like about vacationing by myself is that in between the various bits of sightseeing, I can catch up on reading. There are too many distractions at home to read as much as I’d like. While out and about, I can read while I eat, I can read in my hotel/b&b room, whatever strikes my fancy. So, beyond a couple of magazines that I just took along for entertainment value and to get them off my reading stack, I took two books with me.

First up was the reading for total pleasure. I’d run across references to the book The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones, in various spots on the internet – I think I even used a quote from the book as part of one of my posts not that long ago. It sounded completely intriguing, and then a couple of food biz friends recommended it highly. I do the same. By turns a romance, a food book (and I’m already tracking down recipes to try out, some of which the author provides on her website), a personal narrative from several perspectives, and even a touch of suspense, the book is well crafted, an enjoyable read – not a completely light, easy reading book, but not overly intellectual either. Initially I thought it was a little… fluffy… when it started out – the narrative part, at times, does have a sort of harlequin romance character to it – but it quickly becomes clear this is intentional and meant to reflect the proponent’s personality more than anything else – sections that are narrated from the point of view of other characters take on an entirely different style, tone and quality of writing – it’s clear that Ms. Mones can write well, and chooses simply to use a lighter style of writing for the first character introduced. I never read her other book for which she is famous – Lost in Translation – I hated the movie, but then, never judge a book by its movie… you know? Highly recommended reading material for anyone who likes food and cooking.

My other book was a bit more on the serious side. Bottomfeeder: How to eat ethically in a world of vanishing seafood by Taras Grescoe, has been sitting on my reading stack for months now. Like other books of the genre – the more prominent recent ones being what seems a slew by Michael Pollan, it’s a grim picture of what we’ve done to our food supply, what’s going to happen if we continue the way we are, and suggestions for what we can do about it. Unlike Pollan, Grescoe tackles the theme with a bit of a sense of humor, and a bit of self-deprecation – in his quest for information, detail, and some of the whys and wherefores, he finds himself, by conscious choice, eating his way through a selection of seafood that he already knows, based on his thesis, he oughtn’t to be. He excuses himself with “this will be the last time I ever…” sort of reasoning, which doesn’t really excuse it, but is the same reasoning that most of us use when confronted with ideas of the sort that we have some responsibility for the planet and our bodies in our choices of what we eat. The old “it’s already been caught, so if I don’t eat it, someone else will or it will go to waste” is a specious argument – lowering demand, in the long run, can only help towards a change in the approach of restaurants’, fishmongers’ and fisheries’ attitudes. One bite at a time. The book does not end on any sort of upbeat or hopeful note – Grescoe seems to have concluded that it’s unlikely change will come in time – one hopes he doesn’t actually believe that, as, if so, the only reason for having written the book would have been self-promotion and greed – and I don’t think that’s the case, I think he just doesn’t sum things up in a way that is as likely to lead towards change as he could have – he’s presented his case, he’s basically stated what he’s going to do about it, and he leaves it up to the individual reader to decide what he or she is going to do. The case statement was powerful, the summation to the jury of his peers could have used more punch. Still, overall it’s well worth a read – not to mention taking some action.

“Given our shared passion for cooking, how is it that we were suddenly convinced to retire our pots and pans for good? It’s not just the extra cupboard space that our oven now provides.”

– from the book reviewed here…

Buenos Aires – Okay, pet peeve in regard to book titles. Yes, book titles. If you have a catchy title, if you, or your editor or publisher, gave it some thought, why do you need a subtitle explaining what your book is all about? Is it really that difficult, with a book called Raw Food Real World for anyone to grasp the subject matter at hand? Does it need 100 Recipes to Get the Glow? Which, by the way, comes across to me at least as less explicative than the title – sure, I get the 100 recipes part, but “get the glow”?

That out of the way, let’s look at the book. It’s a subject matter that’s all the rage these days – raw food or life food. It’s written by a chef who, at least within the New York foodie world, is pretty well known, and his wife, who isn’t. It’s beautifully illustrated with photos of the food, and less so with lots of pictures of the two of them, presumeably glowing. Not that they’re not a cute couple, in fact, Matthew Kenney is… well, was… one of the cutest chefs around – but that’s 15 years ago or so when he was running Matthew’s on the Upper West Side (which was not a raw food vegan restaurant and was a spot I regularly dined at and had a good number of late eve conversations with Matthew about the industry after introducing myself) – we all lose a bit of cuteness with age, you know? Graphically, it’s not well designed – the recipes for the most part are fine, but the chapter introductions are all done in spindly white text set on vividly colorful pages, with a particular fondness it seemed for yellow and orange, making them difficult to read.

Their explanations of how and why they got into a raw food lifestyle are relatively straightforward, if, perhaps, punctuated by a few too many gee golly gosh how good I felt after I did this moments that get a bit repetitive. The level of detail is probably just about perfect for someone who’s more interested in this as a recipe book than as an explication of the lifestyle itself. The recipes are well written and clear, and sound delicious. On the other hand, most of them sound like things that are fairly complex to make – the “real world” part of the title is a bit misleading. I did a little surfing online to see what sort of reaction the book has garnered among the raw food folk, and one of the most common comments is something to the effect of “everything looks so good, but way beyond my skill level to make”. Which was my reaction and I cook for a living.

The recipes, and the whole story they present, in general, are clearly aimed at those with a lot of time on their hands to make stuff, and more, with a lot of cash to burn. Exotic ingredients, professional level equipment – and no suggestions for substitutions on either – in fact a bit disparaging of any attempts to make this food without using the best (and most expensive) kitchen tools and ingredients out there (with supplier sources listed for where to order all this exotica from should you live somewhere, say, other than New York City or San Francisco).

On the positive side, I like that they don’t preach. In fact they’re quite clear that they aren’t fanatically committed to a 100% raw food vegan lifestyle, and actually enjoy eating both cooked food and non-vegetable food, when they eat out, but have chosen this for home – and even that has it’s minor exceptions. In their lead-ins they do make it sound like anyone could jump on the bandwagon should they want to, it’s just a shame that the recipes make it seem far harder than it has to be to do so. And that leaves this book, for me, as one to sit and glow on the coffee table, should you be so inclined, and less likely to be on the kitchen bookshelf where it might be used.