Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating - Softcover

Willett, Walter, M.D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743223225 ISBN 13: 9780743223225

Publisher: Free Press, 2002

Synopsis

From the renowned Harvard Schools of Public Health and Medicine comes the revolutionary New Food Pyramid that updates and challenges the USDA food pyramid. Based on information gleaned from the Nurses' Health Study, the Physician's Health Study, and the Health Professionals Study that tracked thousands of people for over 20 years, as well as other population studies and research, experts at Harvard now provide new guidelines on the most important foods for enhancing and prolonging life. Exposing the problems of popular diets such as the Zone and the Atkins diet, Dr. Willett offers eye-opening new research on the optimum ratio of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, and the relative importance of various food groups and supplements. Readers will learn why weight control is the single most important nutritional factor and what the three other most critical factors of healthy eating are. They will find out how to choose wisely between different types of fats, which fruits and vegetables provide the best health insurance, and the proportions of each to integrate into their daily diet. And all this new, exciting nutritional information is translated for the reader into simple menu plans, and tasty recipes that make utilizing the New Food Pyramid a breeze. Completely unique and authoritative, the national bestseller EAT, DRINK, AND BE HEALTHY will teach everyone an entirely new way to eat.

About this title

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

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743223225
• ISBN 13: 9780743223225
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 299