Real Food: What to Eat and Why

By Nina Planck
Bloomsbury Publishing

Review by Sally Fallon

It's great to get the Weston A. Price message published by a mainstream press, especially by a talented writer like Nina Planck, one whose background gives her a valuable perspective on food and health. Planck's parents were college-educated activists (her father was a university professor) who then chose to be farmers--Planck grew up working on the family vegetable farm and participating in farmers' markets. She expressed her teenage rebellion by becoming a vegetarian for a few years, which made her very familiar with all the arguments for a plant-based diet, as well as the health problems that ensue.

Much of her book is devoted to debunking the lowfat, vegetarian message. She tackles the notion that meat causes cancer or that farm animals are bad for the environment in her chapter on meat--"Why Even Vegetable Farms Need Animals." Planck endorses what even the grass-fed movement has denigrated--animal fat in the form of marbled beef, bacon and schmaltz. There's more on the virtues of saturated fat in a chapter called "Real Fats," and paeons to butter and cream in a chapter on "Real Dairy." Planck extols the health and economic benefits of raw milk as well.

Planck's love of food and robust optimism shine through every page of this delightful book--of course she enjoys life, she eats plenty of good fat. Egg-white omelets and skinless chicken breasts, those darlings of the dietitians, those icons of food puritanism, get the whacking they deserve--Planck calls them culinary abominations--as do soy, vegetable oils, trans fats, farmed fish and corn syrup. Let's all help her get on the best-seller list by buying a copy.

About the Author

Sally Fallon is the author of Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, and Eat Fat, Lose Fat (both with Mary G. Enig, PhD), as well as of numerous articles on the subject of diet and health. She is President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and founder of A Campaign for Real Milk. She is the mother of four healthy children raised on whole foods including butter, cream, eggs and meat.

Source: http://www.westonaprice.org/bookreviews/real-food-review.html