Food is food; it isn’t medicine. If you aren’t sick, stay away from heavily medicalized cookbooks, the ones with ““fitness’’ in the title or ““heart’’ or any other internal organ. Avoid cookbooks with recipes created by ““trained nutritionists’’ or ““leading dietitians.’’ The exception to this rule is Dr. Dean Ornish’s best-selling Eat More, Weigh Less (HarperCollins. $22.50), with first-rate recipes supplied by first-class chefs.
Check out the ingredients before you buy the book. You want to avoid relying on foods that have had their natural fat tortured out of them. Fat-free cheese, fat-free sour cream, egg substitutes – applied sparingly, such ingredients can be useful, but if they are the author’s chief means of keeping fat in check, look elsewhere. The finished product will taste as artificial as the food that went into it.
Don’t drive yourself crazy looking for books with the lowest number of fat grams per recipe. Most often those numbers come from Handbook 8, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s official list of 5,300 foods and their nutrient composition. The General Accounting Office recently criticized Handbook 8 as unreliable: it often takes data directly from the food industry or the scientific literature without independent verification. The other reason to ignore those numbers is that you don’t eat numbers, you eat food. See next rule.
Choose books with recipes that take full advantage of fruits, vegetables, grains and beans, with fats used discreetly to supply some heft and flavor. For instance: anything in the excellent ““light’’ series by Martha Rose Shulman: ““Mediterranean Light,’’ ““Entertaining Light’’ and her latest, Provencal Light (Bantam. $29.95). This is smart, sophisticated cooking. Or the now legendary In the Kitchen with Rosie (Knopf. $14.95), by Oprah’s chef Rosie Daley; the recipes work, and they’re good. And for a regular supply of healthful, imaginative recipes, try Eating Well magazine. The writing – on the science and culture of food – is as lively as the cuisine.
