Publication Date: Wednesday Feb 9, 2000

To Your Health: Two nutrition books make understanding easy

Once the hysteria of New Year's resolutions die down and the novelty of the new diet wears off, there are some books worth reading about nutrition that make February a perfect month for rethinking how to approach healthy eating.

A "Nutrition and Longevity," from the esteemed Johns Hopkins White Papers series, is a succinct book whose message is contained in its title. The relationship between nutrition and lifespan is something that is bandied about every day in the popular media, and for most of us the effect is head-spinning confusion.

"Nutrition and Longevity" approaches the subject assuming that the reader already knows the basics of nutrition, and is pursuing the news behind all the headlines and hype. This White Paper outlines the latest information on the role nutrition plays in disease prevention. An overview of nutrition basics is followed by a discussion of the individual nutrients that have been linked to the prevention or development of chronic diseases.

The book begins with lists of the highlights of the past year's newest research findings, which make it easy for the reader to go directly to those articles that interest them.

For example, there's a sidebar article on the positive health effects that monounsaturated fats may have against breast cancer. This article is found alongside the pages that discuss the different kinds of fat. For anyone who has felt confounded by the terms saturated, unsaturated, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated, the section on fats should be very illuminating.

The White Paper shows that new research on trans fatty acids (TFAs) has found that these fats have the same negative health effects as saturated fatty acids and that they are not listed on food labels. The discussion of TFAs explains how to determine which prepared foods are likely to contain TFAs. The section on fats goes beyond analysis of the types of fat, and includes sections on dietary fat and weight, fat and cancer, and recommendations for fat intake. There is also a clear side-by-side comparison of the U.S. nutritional pyramid diet and the famous Mediterranean diet, with discussion about both.

For those interested in vitamins and supplements as a part of nutrition, there is ample presentation of material on this subject. A chart on the best dietary sources of specific vitamins discusses the differences in dietary sources and supplementary sources of vitamins. There is also a long chapter on antioxidants and nutrition for those interested in research on that subject.

Another good, but entirely different, book on nutrition is "The Tufts University Guide to Total Nutrition." The Tufts guide is over 300 pages, and could best be described as a consumer-level primary text on nutrition and diet. It is easy to read, and while the language includes technical, scientific terminology, the overall readability is very user-friendly. If you've never paid much attention to nutrition, or just don't know much about the subject, this book will take you through it in a comprehensive manner. The "Tufts University Guide to Total Nutrition" is divided into five sections with multiple chapters in each section--The Fundamentals of Good Food, Eating Better in America, Nutritional Life-Cycles, Making the Diet-Health Connection, and Keeping Fit and Trim.

For families where there is always a range of ages, this book provides information about the changing nutritional needs of children as they move from childhood to adulthood, as well as the needs of adults as they age. Understanding that nutritional needs change as we progress through life allows us to maintain good health as we age.

The fourth part of the book, Making the Diet-Health Connection, includes the Tufts Low-Cholesterol Diet with 21-day menus and kitchen-tested recipes. It also has a sub-section, "Can Diet Cure What Ails You?" that addresses diet related illnesses such as diabetes, kidney stones, gout and heartburn.

The section on Vitamins and Minerals addresses popular myths about what vitamins are touted to be able to do, and presents the facts about what their real qualities are. The RDA (recommended dietary allowances) charts present the recommendations for all vitamins and minerals that should be included in anyone's diet, and the chart shows the RDAs by age beginning with infants from birth to six months. This book is a useful tool for making sure that the nutritional needs of everyone in the family are being met. You can purchase both these books off the Health Library's Web site (http://healthlibrary.stanford.edu) in the Bookstore section.

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