[.ca] Real Food (ISBN 1596913428)

A food guide filled with good sense:
I almost never read books about food and diet, but I enjoyed this book. Ms. Planck doesn't dictate what the reader should eat, and advises against ever counting calories or fat or anything else. What she presents is more like a philosophy for eating--a philosophy for eating (and enjoying) Real Food rather than industrial food. The basic idea of the book is that the modern highly processed, low-fat or vegetarian diet is lacking in nutrients that humans need to stay healthy. In order to have the health of previous generations we need to eat a nutrient-dense diet like previous generations. This means eating traditional fats like butter, lard, chicken fat, and olive oil. (She makes some really excellent arguments as to why saturated fat has been wrongly accused of being unhealthy.) This means eating meat from cattle raised traditionally on the diet they are meant to eat--grass. This means eating lots of eggs from pastured chickens and raw milk--pasteurizing kills all the useful enzymes in milk that allow us to properly digest it and receive all the nutrients milk has to offer. This means eating wild fish, and traditional fermented foods. This means avoiding highly processed, industrial foods especially, hydrogenated oils and white sugar. She also makes a good case against industrial soy products--these are laced with undesirable chemicals left from processing, hard to digest, and may unbalance hormone levels in the body. Soy should be eaten fermented, (as soy sauce or tofu) the way it has been eaten in Asia for thousands of years. She talks quite a bit about heart disease, and how it is not caused by saturated fat or cholesterol, but rather by a lack of nutrients in the modern diet (as well as by a lack of exercise and by trans fats). Her ultimate conclusion is that it doesn't matter so much what exactly you eat--there is a great variety of good food to choose from in this day and age--as long as it didn't come from a factory. We need to eat Real Food to be healthy. And we need to stop getting hung up over fat and calories.

Decent, but read Pollan:
This is a decent book on balanced eating and food fads and the industrialized food industry. But I would recommend Michael Pollan instead--his information depends more on research than personal anecdote, and I like his tone better.