Daley Rosie - The healthy kitchen: recipes for a better body, life, and spirit

There have been several new developments in the related areas of health and nutrition since the publication of The Healthy Kitchen. The obesity epidemic in North America has become ever more apparent and has received an increasing amount of attention. Many more people are following the Atkins diet, which now claims some tentative support from medical research. Grassroots movements to ban the sale of junk food in school have sprung up in several states, and a few lawsuits have been filed against manufacturers of fast food by consumers who claim they became addicted to it and suffered health consequences as a result. Federal organic standards have gone into effect in the United States; in order to carry the Department of Agriculture's organic seal, products must contain at least 95 percent organic ingredients.

On the whole, people remain as confused as ever about the relationship between diet and health, and the information coming at them is often contradictory. This new, paperback edition of The Healthy Kitchen can help clarify some of the issues.

I continue to feel that the biggest nutritional problem we have is the increasing percentage of refined and processed foods the average person eats. Fat is not the issue. There are good and bad fats. Carbohydrate is not the issue. There are good and bad carbohydrates. Meat is not the issue. A meat eater can be just as healthy as a vegetarian. What is undermining our health is processed foods. They are the main source of bad fats and bad carbohydrates along with additives we don't need, and they displace from our diets the fruits, vegetables, and whole grains we do need for the protective elements they contain.

Here is my latest thinking on some of the key issues:

Low-Fat vs. Low-Carbohydrate Diets

You can lose weight on any kind of a diet; the trick is to keep it off by finding a healthful way of eating you can live with and a regimen of physical activity you can stick to. For initiating weight loss, more people find a low-carbohydrate regimen easier and more satisfying than a low-fat one, and medical research strongly supports the idea that many people are carbohydrate sensitive as a result of their genetic makeup. Carbohydrate-sensitive individuals are particularly susceptible to weight gain if they eat refined carbsthat includes products made with flour or sugar, for example. But that does not mean they should follow the Atkins diet, which is overloaded with meat and deficient in fruits and vegetables. I do not recommend it for more than short-term dietingsay six weeks or less. As a long-term strategy this way of eating puts too much of a workload on the kidneys and undermines body defenses against cancer and other chronic diseases that tend to show up later in life.

A sensible low-carbohydrate diet should include vegetable protein (from soy and other legumes), plenty of vegetables, some fruit (especially berries), the right kinds of fats (olive oil, nuts, avocado, oily fish), and some slowly digested carbohydrate foods like beans, sweet potatoes, winter squash, and whole grains (wild rice and quinoa, for example), which, along with fruits and vegetables, provide needed fiber. This way of eating can maintain optimum health over a long period and, in combination with exercise, will normalize weight even in the most carbohydrate-sensitive individuals. On the other hand, low-fat diets often make things worse for these people, because they are high in carbohydrates, including refined carbohydrate in such products as fat-free cookies and frozen yogurt.