Product Description

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Pyramid is one of the most recognizable icons in America today, seen everywhere from the backs of cereal boxes to elementary school displays to graduate school textbooks. Millions of Americans try to eat six to eleven servings of grains daily, three servings of milk or cheese, and so on. You may be one of them.

Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy tells you why the pyramid is wrong. Not merely wrong, but wildly wrong. And not just wildly wrong, but even dangerous. Most important, the book provides a new one in its place, a new food pyramid derived from decades of research by Harvard Medical School and Harvard’s School of Public Health. In Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, Dr. Walter Willett, one of the world’s most distinguished experts on nutrition, tells you why eggs are not the poison the public has been taught, and why some margarines are a lot worse than you thought. He tells you why the oil in a potato chip can be better for you than the potato, tells you what is good about nuts and bad about too much milk. Dr. Willett builds a general set of dietary guidelines that makes sense out of the welter of conflicting nutritional advice bombarding us daily — not merely from the USDA, but from books and physicians preaching everything from banishing carbohydrates to ultra lowfat diets. He shows how none of this nutritional advice has prevented an epidemic of obesity in America today.

Based on research gleaned from the world-famous Nurses’ Health Study, the Physicians’ Health Study, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study — studies that tracked hundreds of thousands of people for more than twenty years — and supported by dozens of other surveys and investigations, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy offers eye-opening new research on the healthiest forms of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, and the relative importance of various food groups and supplements. You’ll learn why weight control is the single most important nutritional factor and what the three other critical factors of healthy eating are. You’ll find out how to choose wisely between different types of fats, which combinations of fruits and vegetables provide the best health insurance, and how to integrate these into your daily diet. You’ll even find specific advice for diabetics, people with hypertension, pregnant women, and nursing mothers. And all of it is translated into simple menu plans and more than fifty tasty recipes that make utilizing the new food pyramid a pleasure.

Unique and authoritative, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy will teach everyone a new and fun way to eat.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

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