Book Review: Food Smart

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Food Smart

Author: Susan G. Berg and Prevention magazine staff

Date: 1998

Publisher: Rodale

ISBN: 0-87596-481-8

Length: 178 pages

Illustrations: decorative drawings

Quote: “Eating the right foods can do wonders for your body. And the fact that you're a woman makes it all the more important.”

That's what you're likely to like and dislike about this book. Like: the focus on women's health concerns. Dislike: the hand-patting “Darling, you are growing up” tone that may make you want to toss the book aside yelling “I know what tampons are, Mother!”--even though this book does not actually mention tampons. (It mentions PMS.)

Personally, what I dislike about it is that they paid someone else and not me to write about the basic low-fat focus-on-organic diet, and the person they paid didn't even know about vegan, gluten-free, or lactose-free diet needs. Wheat (if it's natural wheat, organically grown, and not processed to death) is a good food for many people, and even cow's milk can be a good nutritional bargain for people who don't eat saturated fat from other sources, but if you have gluten or lactose intolerance it's hard to maintain any respect for writers who recommend wheat toast with cream cheese as a healthy breakfast.

And, about vegan diets, all these writers find to say is unsupportive. Because healthy bodies normally contain yeast organisms which help the body break down some foods before they in turn break down and nourish the body, most of us are equipped to go vegan for a year or two without developing deficiencies in the nutrients carnivores get from meat, milk, and eggs: the body uses a lot of those nutrients just to digest animal protein, and the vegan body gets as much of them as it really needs from its own yeast. In 1998, however, Prevention magazine didn't seem to be employing anyone who'd studied the quirks and benefits of a vegan diet. All Berg and her colleagues do, in this book, is mutter that you need some nutrients that are found in animal protein. 

In fact most vegans do eventually phase back to using some sort of animal protein, whether that's a once-a-month “feast” on beef or chicken, a vegetarian diet that uses milk and egg products, George Bernard Shaw's grudging consumption of a course of desiccated liver pills as “medicine,” or a traditional Buddhist diet of bread made from weevilly wheat. Humans were designed to live on our own intestinal flora, with no protein intake from any other animal, for a year but not for much longer. Food Smart does not discuss this fact. It reads like a book published by a traditional sleek magazine sponsored by the Pork Growers' Council.

Grumble, grumble, grumble...In any discussion of eating for health, writers are likely to be read by a wide range of readers when they're writing for only one reader or type of reader. It may or may not be helpful to imagine these readers as typical individuals, with names.

1. Anne Smith, a 29-year-old department store manager, always used to be proud of her trim figure but is now finding that figure harder to maintain. Her question is, “Isn't there a way to eat normally, not 'going on a weight loss diet' but just eating the right number of calories to maintain my weight without dieting?” Food Smart was written for Anne Smith.

2. Beth Brown, a 35-year-old primary school teacher, officially quit work in order to spend the first five years with her baby, but is not sure she'll ever be going back. She feels sick and tired. She's not overweight; she's skinny and flabby. What she wants to know about food is why all of it seems to have become so hard to digest these days and why the only thing that still tastes good is purple Necco Wafers. What it should be considerably easier for Beth to learn than it was for some of her elders is that, although lactase persistence (the minority ability to digest cow's milk as an adult) is most common in Europe and among people of European ancestry, even in Europe some people lose the ability to digest cow's milk at some point after age twenty-five. Some White people are lactose-intolerant. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed Beth is one of them. Food Smart won't be much help to Beth Brown. It contains information she might be able to use, but in order to use that information she'll have to read slowly and selectively, mentally adding notes, “That's not for me, I can't use dairy products,” to almost every page.

3. Carol Jones, a 22-year-old telemarketer, is obese. She continues to gain weight while following weight loss diets. She has thyroid failure. She has other symptoms related specifically to the ability to digest fatty food. Carol Jones feels much better after reading Food Smart but she continues to gain weight. When she tells people how much better she feels, they roll their eyes, try to change the subject, and laugh behind her back.

This list could go on, up to (and beyond) Priscilla King, a 50-year-old writer who has never been obese but has often been sick due to gluten intolerance. 

A book that takes that personal, confidential, auntly tone in presenting the information Anne needs may be more likely to annoy Beth and Carol and the rest of us than a book that simply presents information. That's unfortunate, in the case of Food Smart, because this book does contain just the information Anne needs and much that Beth and Carol could use too.

So, I say, anyone can use this book, but oh, how Your Mileage Will Vary. If you're already on a restricted diet such as a gluten-free or lactose-free diet, you may already know how to adapt the information Food Smart offers to fit your needs. If you need a special diet and aren't already following one, Food Smart won't help you. If you're one of those young people who've been eating whatever was cheap and convenient, however, Food Smart may be just what you need to prevent deficiency diseases and maintain your sleek young figure.

It's a Fair Trade Book. You can find copies on Amazon well below our minimum price for all online purchases, which is $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment; since Food Smart is a bulky book I'm not sure that even two copies would fit into one $5 package, though you could fit a couple of thin paperbacks into the package along with Food Smart. However, if you send a U.S. postal money order for $10 to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or a Paypal payment of $11 to the address you get by notifying Salolianigodagewi that you're interested in this book, this web site will send $1 to Susan Berg or a charity of her choice.