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Sunday, February 7, 2021

Food Diet Books (Intermittent Fasting; Mediterranean Diet Cookbook for Beginners (both Alpha Books)

 
3.INTERMITTENT FASTING DIET; guide + cookbook (Alpha Books, DK Publishing, 2020, 224 pages, ISBN 978-1-4654-9766-6 $25.99 paperbound) is by Becky Gillaspry, creator of www.drbeckyfitness.com. She's a chiropractor with two YouTube channels and teaches a range of college medical courses. This is advice and tips on fasting strategies with more than 50 food preps and four flexible meal plans. The major idea is to shift the eating window to allow for proper balance in fasting for nutritional increases. You'll want to avoid gaining weight or slowing metabolisms. Gone, for the moment, are the three meals a day AND the six meals a day food patterns. These are replaced by time-restricted eating such as the proportions of 12:12 or 16:8 or 20:4, where you can fast safely for 12 hours, or 16 or 20. In our family, 16 hours fasting (which includes 8 hours sleep) seems to work best. This is easy to accomplish: a late breakfast or brunch at 10:30 or so followed by an early dinner at 5:30 or 6. She discusses all of these, along with caveats (e.g., diabetes) that should be looked at with the guidance of physicians. Some of the best meal plans may be low-carb meals, or a ketogenic diet, or dairy-free, or vegetarian. Gillaspry lays it all out, and you the reader gets to decide. It's all very effective. Every recipe is loaded with nutritional data. The book could have been improved if it also used metric in the recipes, or at least had a metric conversion chart. Quality/price rating: 91.
 
 
 
4.MEDITERRANEAN DIET COOKBOOK FOR BEGINNERS; meal plans, expert guidance, & 100 recipes to get you started (Alpha Books, DK Publishing, 2020, 192 pages, ISBN  978-1-4654-9767-3 $25.99 paperbound) is by Elena Paravantes, a registered dietitian and expert on the Mediterranean diet, active as a writer, consultant, hanging out at her website www.olivetomato.com. It is all pretty basic stuff, but it does "get you started". The principles and rationales are nicely explained for the "authentic" Mediterranean diet, which started as wine, bread and olives centuries ago. But a 1948 study of Crete produced evidence of a strong nutritional setting for wild greens, beans, vegetables, fruits, bread, homemade wine, and olive oil. In the 1950s, the focus shifted to southern Europe. By 1993 Oldways had created a food pyramid based on Crete, and the rest is (as they say) history. So she carefully explains what to eat and how often to eat it, proposing a two-week getting started Mediterranean diet meal plan, The come the preps in cookbook order: breakfasts, veggies and beans, pasta/rice/savoury pies, seafood and some meat, salads, snacks and desserts. There's briami (sheet pan roasted veggies), Mediterranean black-eyed pea stew, caponata (Sicilian eggplant), tiropita Greek chese pie), kagianas (scrambled eggs with feta and tomatoes), gigantes (roasted butter beans),  and fakorizo (lentils with veggies and rice). Not surprisingly, many of the preps are Greek and Sicilian or south of Italy. She concludes with a bibliography for more reading. Preparations have their ingredients listed in avoirdupois measurements, but there is no table of metric equivalents. Quality/Price Rating: 88.
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Your health depends on my health. We cannot escape one another in these perilous times.
Chimo! www.deantudor.com

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