Tuesday, 16th May 2006, 3:19pm
An opinion by: Johanna

 

The Complete Guide to Nutritional Health by Pierre Jean Cousin and Kirsten Hartvig

I bought this book as part of my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome healing programme. Whilst reading up on herbs and their infinite healing properties, I came across something about potatoes. It reported that in India the skins were used to heal swollen gums and burns. I imagined Sufis wandering around with jacket potatoes on their faces in the hot sun, and wondered why it never caught on in the West. I became interested in the healing properties of foods, i.e. gaining the optimum benefits from something we do every day and take for granted.

On first impressions, this book seemed to be coffee-table eye candy, in layout and presentation. But it turned out to be packed with incredibly concise, specific and well indexed information. Whilst there is no waffle or duplication, it is easy to cross-reference, depending on your reason for dipping into the book--looking up foods and their nutritional properties, or searching by ailment, or simply using it as a healthy cookbook.

The book is separated into two main parts, the first ‘Food is Medicine’ authored by Cousin, and the second ‘Eat for Immunity’ by Hartvig. In Part One, chapter one, the main food types are explained, detailing their properties, which body system they are particularly helpful for, and its related illnesses. Both authors have highlighted ‘super foods’ that they regard as having exceptional health promoting properties, for example carrot, blueberry and garlic. Chapter two covers foods by common ailments, chapter three is the recipe section, and chapter four is ‘Diet in Practice.’ This chapter suggests a detox diet, directory of vitamins, minerals etc, and discusses choices of water and culinary oils from an optimum health point of view.

Part Two, ‘Eat for Immunity’, starts with an introduction to the immune system in Chapter five, has a similar encyclopaedia of healing foods specifically for the immune system, and focuses on some particular ‘superfoods’ in chapter six.

Chapter seven has a comprehensive guide to coping with common ailments, including ones that conventional medicine doesn’t yet consider to be related to the immune system like heart disease, and allergies. However, when you look at the properties of the foods we eat, it makes perfect sense that the immune system is the gateway to all other systems, and a malfunctioning or badly supported immune system easily leads to other problems because of deficiencies in the diet. The final chapter mirrors part one, containing ‘Immune Foods in Practice’, a section with lots of delicious recipes, divided into breakfasts, soups, mains, desserts and herbal drinks and syrups.

When I was browsing the shelves of the bookshop, I was horrified by the garish array of diet fads jostling for my attention: get thin quick, the Atkins diet, the GI diet, the GL diet, the no-diet diet. All these bitchy TV star women with pointy elbows and flippy hair trying to sell mental disease to perfectly normal people. Make a good bonfire I’d reckon.

I love the premise of ‘The Complete Guide to Nutritional Health’--that food needn’t be your enemy, you just have to be eating the right foods, and you can treat anything from cold sores to cancer if you just educate yourself with some simple facts. Basically anything nature throws at us with one hand, she holds the cure for in the other.

I think I should laminate the cover of this book; I have the feeling it’s going to get a lot of use!

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