The Power of Positive Eating
Just say "Yes" to healthy foods - and "Yum" to lifelong pleasures.
 
Text by Maureen Callahan and Rob Davis, Recipes by Victoria Riccardi, Photography by Randy Mayor -
Cooking Light, May 2000

Tired of being told what not to eat? Join the club. In the laudable national quest for good health, finger-pointers and fearmongers too often shout down the voices of moderation, hope, and plain old enjoyment. Every bite becomes a nagging vexation. In T.S. Eliot's poem, J. Alfred Prufrock only had to wonder, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" These days, it's whether to quit carbohydrates, shun sugar, flee from fat, or ban beef. And every other new book on the market contains its own special proscription, some hitherto undiscovered "secret" about which foods to deep-six. You would get the idea that the only way to eat healthfully is also to walk a tightrope - designed for Olympic athletes with 2% body fat.

Not from us, though. Cooking Light has always stuck with one elegantly simple message: Choose a balanced diet in combination with sensible exercise. You'll have fun, you'll eat well, and you'll stay healthy. We think it's worth nothing, therefore, that there's been an important shift in proactive advice from five of the nation's leading health organizations: the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Dietetic Association, the American Heart Association, the American Institute for Cancer Research, and the National Institutes of Health. Within the past year, all have endorsed a new dietary position that emphasizes what might be called the power of positive eating: concentrating on what foods are good for you, rather than worrying about the ones that aren't.

The positive-eating messages, directed at possible changes to federal "Dietary Guidelines" (seven tenets used to shape a number of government nutritional programs), started in June 1999 with a call from the AICR for "reshaping of the American diet in a positive manner." According to Melanie Polk, the cancer-fighting group's director of nutrition education, the new strategy "is to encourage people to eat what makes them healthier." That doesn't mean brow-heating the public about what to fear, but giving people sound and appealing suggestions about how to make the good stuff more appealing. Such as what? Not hard to guess. "Vegetables and fruit, along with other plant-based foods," said the AICR, "should be moved to the center of the plate at breakfast, lunch, and dinner."

That position, with some modifications, got strong backup a few weeks later when the other four health grouped issued a joint call for what they dubbed "Unified Dietary Guidelines." Instead of confusing people with a lot of different diets, the group said, the best advice would be for everyone to essentially follow a single, simple set of parameters known to enhance, if not prolong, human life. The unified approach would be a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet high in vegetables, fruits, cereals, and grains. Although a little more open than the strong plant-based recommendation from the AICR, the Unified Guidelines also indicated a shift of focus to the benefits of what's healthy, not unhealthy. It also strongly suggested that specialty and fad diets, which typically vilify or extol one or two dietary components, often in an extreme way, are irrelevant. The good news is that we don't need one diet to prevent heart disease, another to decrease cancer risk, and yet another to prevent obesity and diabetes, says Richard J. Deckelbaum, M.D., a professor of pediatrics and nutrition at Columbia University and a member of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee. A single healthy diet cuts across disease categories to lower the risk of many chronic conditions.

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