I recently came across the book Joy Bauer’s Food Cures: Eat Right to Get Healthier, Look Younger and Add Years to Your Life. According to the author’s website, “Joy Bauer MS, RD, is America’s favorite and most trusted nutrition expert. Her mission is to improve the health of our nation; she believes it’s never too late or too early to reap the benefits of healthy living.” She is the nutrition expert for The Today Show and has written many New York Times best-selling books.
Joy Bauer’s Food Cures is loaded with information on how to eat to look and feel your best. It includes chapters about eating to lose weight and have healthy skin, hair and teeth. The book delves into how to eat to fight cardio-vascular disease, arthritis, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, vision and memory as well as fighting migraines, PMS, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, celiac disease and preventing cancer.
Joy’s slogan is that “Life is hard. Food should be easy.” Her book is full of advice and tools that really do make it easy to eat healthy foods. For example, she recommends thinking like a nutritionist by planning your meals ahead of time, eating lots of vegetables and fruits, opting for whole grains and fiber-rich foods and purging your home of unhealthy foods.
Each chapter begins with a shopping list for your specific food cure and ends with pages of recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The recipes are simple yet far from what you think of as traditional “diet” foods. Her recipes call for ingredients that I typically keep on hand all the time – fresh produce, herbs, olive oil, low fat (or homemade) salad dressings and lean meats.
Even when it comes to eating for weight loss, she doesn’t condemn beef or cheese in moderation, which many diet books will tell you to avoid.
Joy Bauer’s Food Cures is a book full of great advice, tips and recipes to help you meet your nutritional goals. She answers many frequently asked nutrition questions in each section of her book with her wealth of knowledge. I’ve enjoyed learning more about nutrition through this book and I look forward to keeping it on my shelf for recipe ideas or advice on specific health issues in the future.