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Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating (Paperback)
by M.D., Walter Willett, P.J. Skerrett
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Health & fitness, Nutrition |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
From a top expert in the field, this nutrition classic is based on many years' research. The only complaint may be it is too short. |
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Author: M.D., Walter Willett, P.J. Skerrett
Publisher: Free Press Trade Pbk. Ed edition
Pub. in: June, 2005
ISBN: 0743266420
Pages: 352
Measurements: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00405
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- Awards & Credential -
National Bestseller (in America) |
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- MSL Picks -
The Chairman of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health offers a revolutionary, sensational, yet logical guide to a healthy diet and lifestyle that not only reduces weight, but the risk of disease as well. In a chatty, informative, and authoritative manner, the author guides us through the myths of the USDA Pyramid to a persuasively sensible way to manage our food intake, which encourages a wide variety of menus, including previously forbidden fats and alcohol.
A detail discussion based on over 30 years' research and diet studies, this book presents an excellent, unbiased, statistical and fact-based analysis of what foods are good and bad for you and why. A leading expert on nutrition who knows how to evaluate evidence and translate it into clear recommendations, few people are as qualified and able to interpret the accumulated data. The strength of this book is in the presentation of very simple principles of exercise and nutrition. The reader will have a good understanding of what to eat and especially what not to eat. The scientific justification will appeal especially to those people in the fields of exercise, health, and medicine, even though readers without any background in health science might find the material dry.
We highly recommend this book and the Audio CD to readers. It's also highly recommended that you read and listen to the book along with two other companions: Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (Paperback) by Sally Fallon and The Zone: A Dietary Road Map to Lose Weight Permanently : Reset Your Genetic Code : Prevent Disease : Achieve Maximum Physical Performance [AUDIOBOOK] (Audio CD) by Barry Sears. These books and Audio CDs will be of great help to your effort to stay healthy and young.
Target readers:
Everyone who cares for their health.
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Walter C. Willett, M.D., is chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School. A world-renowned researcher, he is one of the leaders of the famous Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study.
Dr. Willett has won many honors, including the Mott Prize, the prestigious award of the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation.
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From the Publisher:
Aimed at nothing less than totally restructuring the diets of Americans, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy may well accomplish its goal. Dr. Walter C. Willett gets off to a roaring start by totally dismantling one of the largest icons in health today: the USDA Food Pyramid that we all learn in elementary school. He blames many of the pyramid's recommendations - 6 to 11 servings of carbohydrates, all fats used sparingly - for much of the current wave of obesity. At first this may read differently than any diet book, but Willett also makes a crucial, rarely mentioned point about this icon: "The thing to keep in mind about the USDA Pyramid is that it comes from the Department of Agriculture, the agency responsible for promoting American agriculture, not from the agencies established to monitor and protect our health." It's no wonder that dairy products and American-grown grains such as wheat and corn figure so prominently in the USDA's recommendations.
Willett's own simple pyramid has several benefits over the traditional format. His information is up-to-date, and you won't find recommendations that come from special-interest groups. His ideas are nothing radical - if we eat more vegetables and complex carbohydrates (no, potatoes are not complex), emphasize healthy fats, and enjoy small amounts of a tremendous variety of food, we will be healthier. You'll find some surprises as well, such as doubts about the overall benefits of soy (unless you're willing to eat a pound and a half of tofu a day), and that nuts, with their "good" fat content, are a terrific snack. Relying on research rather than anecdotes, this is a solidly written nutritional guide that will show you the real story behind how food is digested, from the glycemic index for carbs to the wisdom of adding a multivitamin to your diet. Willett combines research with matter-of-fact language and a no-nonsense tone that turns academic studies into easily understandable suggestions for living.
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Chapter One: Introduction
We eat to live.
It's a simple, obvious truth. We need food for the basics of everyday life - to pump blood, move muscles, think thoughts.
But we can also eat to live well and live longer. By making the right choices, you will help yourself avoid some of the things we think of as the inevitable penalties of getting older. A healthy diet teamed up with regular exercise and no smoking can eliminate 80 percent of heart disease and 70 percent of some cancers. Making poor choices - eating too much of the wrong kinds of food and too little of the right kinds, or too much food altogether - increases your chances of developing cancer, heart disease, diabetes, digestive disorders, and aging-related loss of vision. An unhealthy diet during pregnancy can even cause some birth defects.
Separating what's good from what's bad can be a discouraging task. Each day you have to choose from an ever increasing number of foods and products, some good, most not so good. Maybe the time you have to prepare food, or even to eat, seems to shrink by the month. To make matters worse, you may feel overwhelmed by contradictory advice on what to eat. Your daily newspaper or TV newscast routinely serves up results from the latest nutrition studies. Magazines trumpet the hottest diets complete with heartfelt testimonials. One new diet or nutrition book hits the bookshelves every other day. Even supermarkets and fast-food restaurants offer advice, as do cereal boxes and a sea of Internet sites. This jumble of information quickly turns into nutritional white noise that many people tune out.
TURNING TO THE USDA PYRAMID IS A MISTAKE
For no-nonsense, rock-solid nutrition information, people often look to the Food Guide Pyramid developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It is supposed to offer straight talk that rises above the jungle of misinformation and contradictory claims.
That's a shame, because the USDA Pyramid is wrong. It was built on shaky scientific ground back in 1992. Since then it has been steadily eroded by new research from all parts of the globe. Scores of large and small research projects have chipped away at the foundation (carbohydrates), the middle (meat and milk), and the apex (fats). The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are supposed to serve as the detailed blueprint for the USDA Pyramid, are a bit better. They are updated every five years and sometimes include ready-for-prime-time research. But the USDA Pyramid hasn't really changed in spite of important advances in what we know about nutrition and health.
At best, the USDA Pyramid offers wishy-washy, scientifically unfounded advice on an absolutely vital topic - what to eat. At worst, the misinformation contributes to overweight, poor health, and unnecessary early deaths. In either case it stands as a missed opportunity to improve the health of millions of people.
REBUILDING THE FOOD PYRAMID
I wrote this book to show you where the USDA Pyramid is wrong and why it is wrong. I wanted to offer a new healthy eating guide based on the best scientific evidence, a guide that fixes the fundamental flaws of the USDA Pyramid and helps you make better choices about what you eat. I also wanted to give you the latest information on new discoveries that should have profound effects on our eating patterns.
The Healthy Eating Pyramid is just as simple as the USDA Food Guide Pyramid. You don't have to weigh your food or tally up fat grams. There are no complicated food exchange tables to follow. You needn't eat odd combinations of foods or religiously avoid a particular type of food. Instead, our pyramid aims to nudge you toward eating mostly familiar foods that have been shown to improve health and reduce the risk of chronic disease. It involves simple changes you can make one at a time. Because it's an eating strategy aimed at improving your health instead of a diet aimed solely at helping you shed pounds, and because the changes suggested in this book can make your meals and snacks tastier, it is something you can stick with for years.
The Healthy Eating Pyramid isn't a single cute idea dolled up in a catchy graphic. It is the distillation of evidence from many different lines of research. This shouldn't be an important point, but it is. Few of the diets used by millions of Americans today are built on this kind of solid evidence. That was certainly clear from the "Great Nutrition Debate" sponsored by the USDA in February 2000. It brought together several authors of best-selling diet books for a lively, but mostly evidence-free, food fight. The wildly different recommendations presented in that three-hour session - eat lots of meat, don't eat any meat, eat lots of carbohydrates, don't eat any carbohydrates, cut your intake of fat to under 20 percent of calories, eat as much fat as you want, stay away from sugar, eat potatoes - neatly captured the chaos that we get in place of sound, sensible, and solid advice on healthy eating. This jumble of contradictions prompted USDA undersecretary Shirley Watkins to say afterward, "We will stand behind the Pyramid." But the USDA Pyramid isn't much better than most of these unsubstantiated diets!
THE HOLES IN THE USDA PYRAMID
Some recommendations on diet and nutrition are misguided because they are based on inadequate or incomplete information. Not the USDA Pyramid. It is wrong because it ignores the evidence that has been carefully assembled over the past forty years. Here are the USDA Pyramid's main and most health-damaging faults:
• All fats are bad. There's no question that two types of fat - saturated fat, the kind that's abundant in whole milk or red meat, and trans fats, which are found in many margarines and vegetable shortenings - contribute to the artery-clogging process that leads to heart disease, stroke, and other problems. But the USDA Pyramid's recommendation to use fats "sparingly" ignores the fact that two other kinds of fat - the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats found in olive oil and other vegetable oils, nuts, whole grains, other plant products, and fish - are good for your heart.
• All "complex" carbohydrates are good. Carbohydrates form the base of the USDA Pyramid. It suggests six to eleven servings of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta a day. But as with fats, this advice is too simplistic and overlooks essential research showing that the types of carbohydrates you eat matters a lot.
Most dietary guidelines recommend limiting simple carbohydrates (sugars) and eating plenty of complex carbohydrates (starches). White bread, potatoes, pasta, and white rice all fit this description and are the main sources of carbohydrates in the American diet. While the terms simple and complex have a specific chemical meaning, they don't mean much inside your body. In fact, your digestive system turns white bread, a baked potato, or white rice into glucose and pumps this sugar into the bloodstream almost as fast as it delivers the sugar in a cocktail of pure glucose. Swift, high spikes in blood sugar are followed by similar surges in insulin. As all this insulin forces glucose into muscle and fat cells, blood sugar levels plummet, triggering the unmistakable signals of hunger. To make matters worse, these high levels of blood sugar and insulin surges are now implicated as part of the perilous pathway to heart disease and diabetes. The harmful effects of these rapidly digested carbohydrates are especially serious for people who are overweight.
The carbohydrates that should form the keystones of a healthy diet come from whole grains, like brown rice or oats, from foods made with whole grains, like whole-wheat pasta or bread, or from beans. Your body takes longer to digest these carbohydrate packages, especially when they are coarsely ground or intact. That means they have a slow, low, and steady effect on blood sugar and insulin levels, which protects against heart disease and diabetes. They make you feel full longer and so keep you from getting hungry right away. They also give you important fiber plus plenty of vitamins and minerals.
The central message in the USDA Pyramid is that you should feel good about eating carbohydrates, especially if you are eating them in place of fats. But if you eat too much of the wrong kinds of carbohydrates and too little of the good kinds of fats, you can set yourself up for the same problems you may be trying to solve.
• Protein is protein. The protein group occupies one of the upper chambers of the USDA Pyramid. You need this type of nutrient every day and can get it from a variety of sources. The USDA Pyramid serves up as equals red meat, poultry, fish, eggs, beans, and nuts. All are excellent sources of protein. But red meat is a poor protein package because of all the saturated fat and cholesterol that come along. Red meat may also give you too much iron in a form you absorb whether you need it or not. Chicken and turkey give you less saturated fat. The same is true for fish, which delivers some important unsaturated fats as well. As protein sources, beans and nuts have some advantages over animal sources. They give you fiber, vitamins, minerals, and healthy unsaturated fats. Like fruits and vegetables, they also give you a host of phytochemicals, an ever expanding collection of plant products that help protect you from a variety of chronic diseases.
• Dairy products are essential. The USDA Pyramid includes two to three servings of dairy products a day. It's a message that the hip "Got Milk?" and even hipper "milk mustache" ads (all sponsored by the dairy industry) hammer home to every possible demographic group. As a prime source of calcium, dairy products have been enlisted to fight the so-called calcium emergency that is threatening Americans' bones. Only there isn't a calcium emergency. Americans get more calcium than the residents of almost every other country except Holland and the Scandinavian countries. And despite plenty of urgent public service announcements, there's little evidence that getting high amounts of calcium prevents broken bones in old age. Further complicating the issue are some studies suggesting that drinking or eating a lot of dairy products may increase a woman's chances of developing ovarian cancer or a man's chances of developing prostate cancer.
If you need extra calcium, there are cheaper, easier, and healthier ways to get it than dairy products. Whole-milk dairy products are loaded with the kind of saturated fat that is most powerful at raising cholesterol levels. One percent and skim milk are clearly better choices. Spinach, broccoli, tofu, and calcium-fortified orange juice and breakfast cereals are good sources of calcium and have other advantages - they are lower in unhealthy fat than most dairy products, and they give you many extra nutrients. Finally, dairy products are an expensive way to get calcium. Calcium supplements or calcium-based antacids cost pennies a day (and they are mostly calorie-free, to boot) compared with up to a dollar a day for two to three servings of dairy products.
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• Eat your potatoes. According to the USDA, the average American eats 140 pounds of potatoes a year, making the spud the most popular vegetable in America. It is one of the few vegetables to be mentioned by name in the Dietary Guidelines - except it shouldn't be classified as a vegetable. Potatoes are mostly starch - easily digested starch at that - and so should be part of the carbohydrate group. While more than two hundred studies have shown that people who eat plenty of fruits and vegetables decrease their chances of having heart attacks or strokes, of developing a variety of cancers, or of suffering from constipation or other digestive problems, the same body of evidence shows that potatoes don't contribute to this benefit.
Nutritionists and diet books alike often call potatoes a "perfect food." But while eating potatoes on a daily basis may be fine for lean people who exercise a lot or who do regular manual labor, for everyone else potatoes should be an occasional food consumed in modest amounts, not a daily vegetable. The venerable baked potato increases levels of blood sugar and insulin more quickly and to higher levels than an equal amount of calories from pure table sugar. French fries as they are usually sold do much the same thing, while also typically packing an unhealthy wallop of trans fats.
• No guidance on weight, exercise, alcohol, and vitamins. Like the Sphinx, the USDA Pyramid is silent on four things you need to know about - the importance of not gaining weight, the necessity of daily exercise, the potential health benefits of a daily alcoholic drink, and what you can gain by taking a daily multivitamin.
HOW THE USDA PYRAMID GOT ITS SHAPE
In Rudyard Kipling's classic children's story, the satiable Elephant's Child got its long trunk in a terrific tug-of-war, with Crocodile clamped on to its nose and Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snake wrapped around its legs. That's pretty much how the USDA Pyramid got its structure - yanked this way and that by competing powerful interests, few of which had your health as a central goal.
The thing to keep in mind about the USDA Pyramid is that it comes from the Department of Agriculture, the agency responsible for promoting American agriculture, not from agencies established to monitor and protect our health, like the Department of Health and Human Services, or the National Institutes of Health, or the Institute of Medicine. And there's the root of the problem - what's good for some agricultural interests isn't necessarily good for the people who eat their products. (This schizophrenic split isn't unique to the USDA. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for example, is charged with the often contradictory tasks of promoting nuclear power and regulating its use.)
Serving two masters is tricky business, especially when one of them includes persuasive and well-connected representatives of the formidable meat, dairy, and sugar industries. The end result of their tug-of-war is a set of positive, feel-good, all-inclusive recommendations that completely distort what could be the single most important tool for improving your health and the health of the nation.
THIS HEALTHY EATING PYRAMID IS BASED ON SCIENCE
You deserve more accurate, less biased, and more helpful information than that found in the USDA Pyramid. I have tried to collect exactly that in the Healthy Eating Pyramid. Without question, I have the advantage of starting with a lot more information than the USDA Pyramid builders had ten years ago. Equally important, I didn't have to negotiate with any special-interest groups when it came time to design this Pyramid.
The Healthy Eating Pyramid isn't set in stone. I don't have all the answers, nor can I predict what nutrition researchers will turn up in the decade ahead. But I can give you a solid sense of state-of-the-art healthy eating today and point out where things are heading. This isn't the only alternative to the USDA Food Guide Pyramid. The Asian, Latin, Mediterranean, and vegetarian pyramids promoted by Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust are also good, evidence-based guides for healthy eating. But the Healthy Eating Pyramid takes advantage of even more extensive research and offers a broader guide that is not based on a specific culture.
About the only thing that the Healthy Eating Pyramid and the USDA Food Guide Pyramid share is their emphasis on vegetables and fruits. Other than that, they are different on almost every level. In the chapters that follow, I will lay out the evidence that shaped this blueprint for healthy eating and will also chart out extra information to help people with special nutritional needs get the most benefit from what they eat. These people include pregnant women, older people, and people with, or at high risk of, heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and some other chronic conditions.
For now, though, the following list of the seven healthiest changes you can make in your diet offers an overview that describes how the Healthy Eating Pyramid differs from the USDA Pyramid. Topping the list is controlling your weight.
• Watch your weight. When it comes to long-term health, keeping your weight from creeping up on you is more important than the exact ratio of fats to carbohydrates or the types and amounts of antioxidants in your food. The lower and more stable your weight, the lower your chances of having or dying from a heart attack, stroke, or other type of cardiovascular disease; of developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or diabetes; of being diagnosed with postmenopausal breast cancer, cancer of the endometrium, colon, or kidney; or of being afflicted with some other chronic condition. Yes, it is possible to be too thin, as in the case of anorexia nervosa, but otherwise very few American adults fall into this category.
• Eat fewer bad fats and more good fats. One of the most striking differences is the placement of healthy fats in the foundation of the Healthy Eating Pyramid instead of relegating all fats to the "Use Sparingly" spot at the top. The message here is almost as simple as the USDA's and far better for you: Fats from nuts, seeds, grains, fish, and liquid oils (including olive, canola, soybean, corn, sunflower, peanut, and other vegetable oils) are good for you, especially when you eat them in place of saturated and trans fat.
The all-fat-is-bad message has started a huge national experiment, with us as the guinea pigs. As people cut back on fat, they usually eat more carbohydrates. In America today, that means more highly refined or easily digested foods like sugar, white bread, white rice, and potatoes. This switch usually fails to yield the hoped-for weight loss or lower cholesterol levels. Instead it often leads to weight gain and potentially dangerous changes in blood fats - lower high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the so-called good or protective cholesterol, and higher triglycerides (a major type of blood fat).
Substituting unsaturated fats for saturated fats, though, improves cholesterol levels across the board. It may also protect the heart against rhythm disturbances that can end in sudden death.
The bottom line is this: It is perfectly fine to get more than 30 percent of your daily calories from fats as long as most of those fats are unsaturated. The Healthy Eating Pyramid highlights the importance of keeping saturated and trans fats to a minimum by putting red meat, whole-milk dairy products, butter, and hydrogenated vegetable oils in the "Use Sparingly" section at the top.
• Eat fewer refined-grain carbohydrates and more whole-grain carbohydrates. The Healthy Eating Pyramid has two carbohydrate building blocks - whole grains that are slowly digested as part of the foundation and highly refined, rapidly digested carbohydrates at the very top.
For almost twenty years our research team has been one of several groups studying the health effects of foods made from refined and intact grains. The result of this work is compelling. Eating lots of carbohydrates that are quickly digested and absorbed increases levels of blood sugar and insulin, raises levels of triglycerides, and lowers levels of HDL cholesterol. Over the long run, these changes lead to cardiovascular disease and diabetes. In contrast, eating whole-grain foods is clearly better for long-term good health and offers protection against diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and gastrointestinal problems such as diverticulosis and constipation. Other research around the world points to the same conclusions.
• Choose healthier sources of proteins. In the Healthy Eating Pyramid, red meat occupies the pointy tip to highlight the fact that something about red meat - its particular combination of saturated fats or the potentially cancer-causing compounds that form when red meat is grilled or fried - is connected to a variety of chronic diseases. In this pyramid, the best sources of protein are beans and nuts, along with fish, poultry, and eggs. It separates vegetable and animal protein sources and makes the latter optional for people who want to follow a vegetarian diet.
• Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits, but hold the potatoes. Vegetables and fruits are essential ingredients in almost every cuisine. If you let them play starring roles in your diet, they will reward you with many benefits besides great taste, terrific textures, and welcome variety. A diet rich in fruits and vegetables will lower your blood pressure, decrease your chances of having a heart attack or stroke, help protect you against a variety of cancers, guard against constipation and other gastrointestinal problems, and limit your chances of developing aging-related problems like cataracts and macular degeneration, the most common causes of vision loss among people over age sixty-five. I've plucked potatoes out of the vegetable category and put them in the "Use Sparingly" category because of their dramatic effect on levels of blood sugar and insulin.
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Susan Love (M.D. author of Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book & Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Book) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Timothy Johnson, M.D., M.P.H. medical editor, ABC News Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy is the best book on nutrition for the general public I have read to date. Dr. Willett is not afraid...to criticize some sacred cows - including the USDA's food pyramid. I urge you to buy this book and read it all for yourself; it will be well worth your time. |
Paul (MSL quote), Canada
<2007-01-05 00:00>
If you're looking for a book that provides practical and scientifically sound advice on diet for the average person, of any age or gender, look no further.
Firstly, the author's credentials and research are first rate. Willett is the chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and he draws his conclusions from well known studies supported by both the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. Further, the nutritional advice in this book is simply an elaboration upon the guidelines in the Healthy Eating Pyramid which is developed and supported by the School of Public Health. In short, this book is written by a highly visible and respected scientist and is supported by solid medical studies. With all this in mind, I, as a scientific layman, feel that Walter Willet's nutritional and medical advice can be trusted.
The main points of the author are as follows:
1. Exercise and maintain a stable, healthy weight.
2. Eat healthy fats.
3. Eat whole grains.
4. Choose healthy sources of protein.
5. Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits
6. If you drink, drink in moderation.
7. Take a multivitamin.
These points are elaborated on over 12 chapters, each of which can be read individually, as needed, or in order. The writing is dry, clear, and concise. Many of the chapters take a "theory and practice" approach to the topic being discussed. For example, the chapter on carbohydrates focuses on describing their different types and respective nutritional benefits and shortcomings, and concludes with how to put the information into practical use. Throughout the book there are informative "side bars" that discuss, for example, fad diets, nuts, diabetes, and the safety of fish. Similarly, there are numerous charts displaying information on the topic at hand, whether it be the percentage of specific fats or the glycemic index in various foods.
At the end of the book is a useful chapter on putting all of the presented information into practice. This chapter includes a week of meal plans, followed by an extensive list of healthy recipes sectioned off into: appetizers and beverages; breads and grains; entrees; vegetarian entrees; soups and stews; salads and side dishes; and desserts.
If I had one suggestion, it would be that there be more coverage of integrating nutrition and exercise. I come from a distance running background and would have like for more guidance on tuning a diet to aid in athletic performance. I imagine a body builder or weight lifter would have similar complaints. However, in fairness, the book is aimed at the general public and does give guidance on proper exercise for the average person.
After reading the book, I was surprised at the nutritional value of some foods and diets that I had thought were "safe" and "unsafe".(The USDA's MyPyramid, and it's famous predecessor the Food Pyramid, are both heavily criticized.) I'm now far better informed about how to live a healthy life and have a healthy diet. Willet has put together a very thorough and complete guideline on how to eat and live in a healthy manner.
If you can only buy one book on nutrition make it this one. |
An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
I learned an enormous amount I did not know about eating a healthy diet. From the causes of bad cholesterol to a well laid out hierarchy of what parts of my health to focus on most, this book has drastically improved my eating habits. I was very impressed by the detail in which the author explains the scientific evidence for his recommendations. I felt that I was being given advice from cold, hard facts rather than untested theories. I have ordered this book for my family members as I believe it has the potential to improve their diets and their long-term health. |
An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
I bought this book with only a scattered and shallow knowledge of proper nutrition. Now, having read it, I feel as if I know most of what I need to eat healthily for the rest of my life. Willett strikes a good balance between generalities (e.g., limit your saturated fat, but be sure to get lots of good unsaturated fats) and specifics (e.g., avoid hamburgers and beefsteak, but use olive oil and eat fish and nuts instead). In other words, I now understand the basic rules of healthy eating, and on top of that I have the author's given me a great start in playing by those rules through his food suggestions. Willett even includes 68 pages of healthy recipes in the back.
Willett writes with a clear passion for healthy living and proper nutrition, and all of his recommendations are backed up (he maintains) by solid science. My only criticism is that often entire sentences or even paragraphs containing key points are repeated chapter after chapter. It's as if Willett expected readers to skip around and not read the book cover-to-cover. Sure, the information he reiterates is important, and he wouldn't want someone poking around in his book to miss it, but for someone with a decent memory like myself who was reading the entire book, it soon became annoying.
I recommend this to anyone who is already eating healthy but wants a decent understanding of the science behind a good diet. Should also be good for anyone who's not eating healthy but wants to start (and why shouldn't you?).
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