Real Food
What to Eat and Why
by Nina Planck
You
won’t find any soy chicken, vegan cheese or nonfat
frozen yogurt in Nina Planck’s kitchen. Instead, her
favorite “health foods” include roast chicken,
mashed potatoes with milk and butter, spinach salad with
bacon and tart cherry pie with lard crust. Many would scoff
at such dishes as not only quaintly traditional, but also
as heart-clogging, cholesterol-raising indulgences. In Real
Food, Planck makes a compelling case that the fats in such
traditional foods like grass-fed poultry and butter as well
as pastured pork and eggs are both essential for our health
and utterly satisfying. She argues that industrial foods
like sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oils, powdered milk and
eggs—not traditional fats like chicken skin and lard—are
the true culprits in the nation’s epidemic of heart
disease and obesity.
Real
Food is a memoir of Planck’s transformation from farm
girl to urban vegan to “real food” advocate.
Raised on her parents’ vegetable farm, she rejected
the meatloaf and bacon of her youth in favor of a more fashionable
vegan diet in her teens and twenties. After years of fragile
health and weight gain, she finally found her way back to
the hearty fare of the family homestead. Surprised by the
weight loss and improvement in health that ensued, Planck
set out to survey the scientific literature on the benefits
of traditional animal fats. What she found is that, contrary
to conventional wisdom, saturated fat and cholesterol are
not dangerous. Rather, industrial farming and processing
rob animal and vegetable fats of their nutrients and can
transform them into carcinogens. Real foods—old, traditional,
unprocessed ones—may actually protect against cancer
and degenerative diseases. Her recommendations include raw,
unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk; traditional fermented
soy; ecologically grown produce; wild salmon; coconut oil;
and grass-fed chicken, beef and pork. Though it is common
sense that fresh, local foods are better for one’s
health than processed ones, Planck backs up everyday wisdom
with science and makes it safe to come home again.
Reviewed
by Rachel Levin
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