How to Eat, How Not to Eat: Two Book Reviews

By Denis Faye

Eat This Not That! by David Zinczenko (Rodale, $19.95)
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food by Mark Bittman (Wiley Publishing, $35.00)

It's easy to say that you're going to turn over a new leaf and completely change your eating habits. It's another thing to actually do it. We live in a fast-paced, overly complicated world where restaurant visits happen, convenience foods magically find their way into your freezer, and five minutes is just too long to let your "instant" oatmeal cook.

And that aside, sometimes bad food just tastes good. So despite all the diet advice in the world, we cheat and eat and get fat.

Fortunately, a couple of books have come out lately that offer a more real-world approach to food. Eat This Not That! by David Zinczenko explains how to make at least vaguely acceptable choices, whether you're heading for a fast food joint or the fridge. How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman takes a cuisine that's popularly known as "rabbit food and cardboard" and turns it into a smorgasbord of culinary delights that will tempt even the most ferocious carnivore.

Zinczenko is also editor in chief of Men's Health, so he knows how to turn well-being lectures into easily digestible tidbits. That's basically what Eat This Not That! is—a series of short, simple, reader-friendly lessons. There's not a thought here that's more than two pages in length, and we're talking small pages. It's the ideal nutrition book for the non-reader.

The book is divided into several sections, but the bulk of it discusses restaurant food. Each two-page spread devotes one page to the healthier options at a particular restaurant (McDonald's, Denny's, P.F. Chang's, etc.), and then a facing page discusses the wrong choices to make. That said, the "healthier" choices are rarely "healthy," given that most restaurants aren't in the healthy business. For example, you'll want to avoid the two slices of Ultimate Deep Dish ExtravaganZZa Feast at Domino's, with its 780 calories, 47 grams of fat, and 2,230 milligrams of sodium. That said, the "better option," two slices of Crunchy Thin Crust Feast with 470 calories, 32 grams of fat, and 1,240 milligrams of sodium, isn't exactly health food.

The book also features more general guidelines for holiday meals, trips to the ballpark, and other special occasions, as well as more general menu guides for eateries such as sushi restaurants, BBQ joints, and tapas bars.

It also offers suggestions on a wide array of prepackaged foods that you'll find at the grocery store. Finally, Zinczenko discusses the merits of whole foods, like fruits and veggies, but I doubt that this book's target audience is terribly interested in the benefits of spinach.

Conversely, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian talks about spinach until the free-range, organic dairy cows come home. But frankly, author Bittman doesn't care if it's healthy or not. He just wants to make it delicious. The book is filled with refined flour and dairy and, gasp, even frying. But it's also filled with hundreds of ways to prepare veggies that most people have written off as "icky." There's nothing icky about Bittman's Kale Pie, Potato and Leek Soup, or Okra Stew with Tomatoes.

I can genuinely say that if you're not willing to try these recipes, it's sad for you. This isn't a cookbook written by hippies or greenies or peaceniks who pretend to know what decadent food tastes like. Bittman has won both the James Beard and Julia Child-IACP cookbook awards. If he serves broccoli, it's going to be rocking broccoli.

This may not be the tome for those who want to wear size negative two jeans or get their body fat into the single digits, but the simple fact is that the lion's share of the ingredients in this book are whole, real foods. If you created 90 percent of your meals using this book, even if you threw a little lean meat in there, it would be difficult not to be healthy.

Zinczenko's book desperately tries to transform heart-attack foods into something not so cardiac-arrest inducing. Conversely, Bittman's book takes the most wholesome foods on earth and makes them a little naughty. Ironically, even though Bittman wears the devil horns in this situation, the choices offered in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian are far, far healthier.