Food Cures: Eat Right to Get Healthier, Look Younger, and Add Years to Your Life
By Joy Bauer

Ready to take on the New Year with a vow to become healthier? Lose weight? Get your heart disease or diabetes under control? Feel better altogether? Joy Bauer’s recent book, Food Cures, is a great resource to help you with your resolution.

The book is divided into chapters, which emphasize particular goals you may wish to obtain through a specific eating pattern. Chapters not only include losing weight, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, but also healthy hair, mood, and migraines.  While the variety of topics keeps the book fresh and interesting to a broad audience, eating patterns aimed at weight loss or controlling diabetes can lead to a more dramatic result than eating for healthier looking hair (which is based more on theoretical concepts as opposed to evidence based research).

Each chapter contains Joy’s 4-Step Program at the end. This includes “The Basics,” a summary of the important points of the chapter, turned into an action plan, “The Ultimate Grocery List,” “Going Above and Beyond,” with further steps the motivated reader can take, and finally “Meal Plans,” containing about 5-12 options for each meal and snacks.

The 4-Step program has the potential to be very useful to the consumer because it takes the information described in each chapter and translates it into a grocery list and specific menus. The meals and snacks all fit into a defined calorie range (300-400 calories for breakfast, 400-500 calories for lunch, and 500-600 calories for dinner with 100 and 200 calorie snack options).   This answers the age-old question that nutritionists hear all the time: “What should I eat?”

Even more useful is that the meals and snacks are calorie controlled and consistent throughout every chapter, making them all interchangeable. So, even if the reader’s goal is weight loss, she can choose meals and snacks from any chapter. This makes it unlikely for the reader to get bored due to limited meal plan examples.

Given the increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity facing Americans today (over two-thirds of adults over the age of 20 are either overweight or obese), Bauer’s chapter on weight loss has the potential for the greatest impact.  She emphasizes mindful eating and recommends a slow, steady weight loss, which will lead to sustained weight loss, instead of very low calorie diets, which are difficult to maintain over time and often can lead to weight regain after the diet is stopped. Bauer emphasizes long-term lifestyle and eating habit changes, as opposed to short -term diets, which could lead to long-term success.

Despite the grocery lists, sound meal plans, and evidence-based research presented in Food Cures, potential pitfalls do exist for the reader. For example, Bauer’s recipes in the meal plans rely on specifically measured portions of foods and if these are not measured, but estimated instead, the consumer is likely to be eating more calories than outlined in the meal plan, which could curb weight loss potential. It takes a very detail-oriented person to measure each ingredient in a meal, down to the 2 tablespoons of shredded cheese topping an omelet or the teaspoon of margarine on a slice of toast.

While there are a wide variety of menus to choose from, there is still the potential for the consumer to feel as if autonomy is taken away from them. By offering specific meal plans, Bauer does not educate the reader on constructing meals on their own at home, according to taste preferences. Consumers may tire of following only the meal patterns outlined in the book and thus lose motivation, limiting success. Another potential pitfall is that all the meal plans are designed to be 1 serving, so it would be difficult to cook dinner for a family of four, and stick exactly to the meal plan.

Finally, the meal plans are based on typical American diet tastes and food preferences. There is not much ethnic variety, so the consumer with Hispanic, Asian or Indian eating habits may feel there are fewer options that fit in with their taste preferences.

Overall, I would recommend Food Cures, as a very informative book and it would be a great start to a New Year’s Resolution aimed at improving health. Bauer’s writing is motivating and she provides all the tools needed to embark on a dramatic change in eating behavior.  It’s a great reference book for healthy eating, and an interesting read due to Bauer’s vast experience, anecdotes, and encouraging voice.

Annie Funk, MPH, RD, LD