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Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy

Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy cover

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Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Har­vard Med­ical School Guide to Healthy Eating‚ by Wal­ter C. Wil­lett, M.D.

When I was nine­teen, I began fol­low­ing a mac­ro­bi­otic diet. When I became a dis­ci­ple of A.C. Bhak­tivedanta Swami the next year, I fol­lowed his veg­e­tar­ian diet with lots of dairy, sugar, and spice for eight years. Then I returned to a reg­u­lar Amer­i­can diet for many years. As I aged, I found I had to deal with var­i­ous diges­tive prob­lems and elim­i­nate cer­tain foods from my diet. Recently, some friends encour­aged a raw food diet. I exper­i­mented with it briefly, but felt it was a bit extreme. There­fore, I turned to Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy hop­ing to find a more man­age­able solu­tion to my dietary needs. I cer­tainly did.
I was sur­prised to find that exer­cise and weight man­age­ment form the basis of this pro­gram. I increased my walk­ing and found that very help­ful. I also now have a bet­ter idea of what is healthy food and what is not based on sci­en­tific study rather than the lat­est fad diet. I cer­tainly feel health­ier again since fol­low­ing Dr. Willett’s guidance.
Since our bod­ies are meant to please Radha-Krishna, it is good to keep them healthy. I heartily rec­om­mend this book to any­one who wants to fol­low a prac­ti­cal, sat­is­fy­ing way of eat­ing that pro­motes good health.
Amazon.com Review
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. –Jill Light­ner –This text refers to the Hard­cover edition.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 18:25 and is filed under Our Bookstore and tagged with , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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