by Nina Planck

The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two, and Baby's First Foods

Following the success of Real Food, Nina Planck's Real Food for Mother and Baby explains why real food is better for a woman and her child. Nina Planck, one of the great food activists, changed the way we view old-fashioned foods like butter with her groundbreaking Real Food. Then she got pregnant.

Never one to accept conventional wisdom blindly, Nina found the usual advice about pregnancy and baby food riddled with myths and misunderstandings. In Real Food for Mother and Baby, Nina explains why many modern ideas about pregnancy and infant nutrition are misguided and why traditional foods are best.

While Nina can be controversial—her op-ed in the New York Times on vegan diets for infants was one of the paper's most e-mailed articles— she's no contrarian. Readers applaud her candor; they also trust her research and welcome her advice.

Nina's basic premise hasn't changed—whole foods are best. Pregnant women need meat and salt, not iron supplements. Nursing will be easier if you act like the mammal you are. Delaying the introduction of certain solid foods doesn't prevent allergies. Cereals are not the best foods for tiny eaters; meat and egg yolks are better.

From conception to two years, the body's overwhelming needs are for quality fat and protein, not for carrots and low-fat dairy. Even as she casts a skeptical eye on the conventional wisdom, Nina is reassuring. She shows you how to keep your baby healthy on good, simple food. Real Food for Mother and Baby will be the new classic on eating for two.

softcover, 272 pages

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By Beatrice Trum Hunter

Whole foods--quality protein from animal sources, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains--have made it possible for humankind to survive, to be healthy, and to procreate through the millennia. Unfortunately, today these nutrient-dense foods are regarded merely as raw materials to be converted into more profitable refined and highly processed products. The potato, for example, is converted into chips and fries, corn-on-the-cob into flakes, and the apple into juice. Similar fractioning of food has occurred throughout all the basic food groups. Food partitioning shortchanges our health by diminishing important nutritional offerings and destroying vital nutrient relationships.

A Whole Foods Primer demonstrates the wisdom of selecting whole foods for optimal intake of nutrients essential for good health. In it, readers will learn about the basic nutritional components of each whole food group and their specific functions and beneficial roles in the body; nutrient profiles and surprising facts about some hundred whole foods; their historical uses as food and medicine; and the latest research that identifies their health-bestowing qualities. To help increase one's intake of this trove of nutrients, A Whole Foods Primer describes the special characteristics that consumers should seek when shopping so they can identify the peak of nutritional value and flavor in whole foods. It also provides instruction on the best cooking techniques and storage conditions to help minimize nutritional losses, as well as the best methods to preserve fresh foods for future use. Useful tips and suggestions to increase the consumption of whole foods easily and to encourage experimentation with unfamiliar ones are included, as are practical resources for recipes, cookbooks, and contact information for hard-to-locate purveyors of quality whole foods. This basic primer makes clear and simple the values of reestablishing our connection to this lost world of whole foods not only for our good health but also for the health of future generations.
192 pages, softcover

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