Customer Reviews

Becoming Vegetarian: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Vegetarian Diet

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are many reasons to become vegetarian, including personal health, costs to the environment and the treatment of animals. Whatever your philosophical bent, this book provides the nuts-and-bolts information needed to maintain a healthy diet. As an athlete, I found it especially helpful to understand the function of fat and the different kinds of fats. Although this book helped ease my conversion into a lacto/ovo vegetarian a year ago, and I did enjoy the section on training non-vegeterians to understand the meatless choice, I would recommend the book highly to anyone, vegetarian or not, wanting to understand human nutritional needs. Food has an enormous social subtext and is surrounded by so much myth and fable it is hard to know what to believe. This book, in its sensible and attractive way, is completely credible.

This is the single best book on vegetarian nutrition in print today. I cannot say enough good things about it. The authors are very familiar with the latest nutritional studies and cover curent issues such as omega-3 fatty acids. No myths or new age babble here. The authors don't pretend there are no nutritional pitfalls in a vegetarian diet, instead pointing out areas of concern and how to deal with them. This includes not just obvious issues like B12 in a vegan diet, but also other critical and not always addressed issues such as riboflavin. For those who don't rely on dairy for their dietary calcium, non-dairy sources of calcium are not just listed, but there is detailed discussion of the dietary factors that both help and hinder calcium absorbtion. The authors avoid the errors of other vegetarian advice-givers and don't make the mistakes of suggesting spinach for calcium (because calcium in spinach is not well absorbed -- read the book and find out why) nor suggesting seaweeds or tempeh for B12 (because the B12 in these foods, when present, is an analog our body cannot use). Whether you are a new vegetarian or have been one for 20 years, this book is a MUST PURCHASE. Give it as a gift to every vegetarian you know!

Not just for vegetarians!! For everyone who wants information on human nutrion -- cancer patients, heart-attack survivors, pregnant women, or just plain folks who will continue to eat meat but want info on cholesterol, carotenoids, fiber, carcinogens, etc. All the basics and the subtlies of human nutrition are covered in an easy to understand book. Topics include protien consumption, both qualitiy and quantity, as well as iron intake, B-12, fatty acids, ecetera. Did you know that while spinach contains iron, it also contains a substance that makes iron unabsorbable by the body? Read this book and you will learn. The book isn't 'preachy' and is not judgemental; it is well written and covers everything you need to know. It debunks myths, and gives real-life examples of how many communities have survived and thrived for generations as vegetarians. This book is not about a fad diet, nor is it trendy.

Includes great practical info, like what to cook for dinner, how to feed an adolenscent, being a diplomat with those dismissive of vegetarians, and even a grocery shopping list with a glossary to define what aduzuki beans are and a recipe on how to cook them.

By the way, I was a vegetarian for 20 years before I picked up this book, and I learned alot from it! I continue to use it as a reference book with all of its nutritional tables and RDA charts.

This book was recommended by a friend of a friend and it has definitely changed my life. I have developed food allergies (dairy being one of them) and needed information on nutrition and meal planning. This book is so thorough and spells out all the different nutrients you need to live a healthy life. And they can all be found in plants! It even has recipes in the back which I have made for non-vegetarians and they loved them. This book is a great gift for anyone who wants to learn to eat healthy.

My wife has been a lacto and mostly ovo vegetarian for over a decade, and I've been slowly reducing my intake of meats for years. We're both athletes; my wife in particular places or wins local trail marathons. We now have a new baby, and my wife is breastfeeding her.

I had specific questions about protein, calcium uptake, and essential fatty acids. This book answered all of my questions with charts, graphs, and thorough discussion, including vegetarian child nutrition. I've checked various sources for this information for years and I'm sorry I wasted my time. I wish I'd just bought this book sooner and saved the effort.

I just finished reading this book. I have tried becoming a vegartarian for years and was never able to accomplish it. I didn't understand how to do so. Much of the book is dedicated to explaining to an average reader how to get the necessary nutrients that your body requires without animal products. It also acknowledges that there are some that will try lacto-ovo vegatarianism as well and includes dairy and eggs too. This book is clear concise and explains everything you'll need to get started. I would recommend that you purchase the companion cook book "Cooking Vegatarian" as the recipes are good but short in this book. I am goin to get the Becoming Vegan book next. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to take real steps to improve the quality of the food you eat and are tired or "Fad Diets". Thanks to the authors for giving me the tools to get started.

This book is a fabulous resource, not just for vegetarians, but for anyone who wants a straightforward approach to nutrition. After reading this book, I understand much more fully the role that iron, protein, calcium, fiber, vitamins, etc. play in my diet and my health. I found the nutritional breakdowns of different diets (omnivore, ovolacto vegetarian and vegan) to be especially helpful. For those who ARE considering vegetarianism, there is a wonderful glossary of terms and a helpful section on vegetarian menu planning. There is also a chapter on how to gracefully deal with the potentially sticky social situations vegetarians sometimes face and a section of basic vegetarian recipes to get you started. Overall, I found this book to be incredibly informative, without being intimidating. As a beginning cook who wants to avoid meat, I know I'll go back to this guide again and again.

After reading the reviews of this book, I thought I should give it a try. I'd been looking for a comprehensive book on vegetarian health. Complete with recipes, the truth about nutrition and reasons to be vegetarian, and relevant information for all degrees of vegetarians, this book deserves all five stars!

This book is an excellent resource for beginning vegetarians who are dealing with a lot of new questions -- will this diet be adequate for me nutritionally? do I need to take supplements? what will I tell mom (hee hee)? This book tries to answer all the big questions, and does so quite admirably. It does have a few recipes at the back, which are not bad, but certainly, this is not a cookbook per se. For those looking for a ton of recipes instead of advice, I'd be more likely to recommend The Essential Vegetarian Cookbook (by Diana Shaw), a wonderful book full of tips, tricks, ingredients, glossaries, and 600 low fat recipes, many of which are adaptations of old favourites. Getting both these books would be an excellent beginning to any new vegetarian's bookshelf.

This is an excellent book. I decided to become vegetarian a few years ago both for health and ethical reasons and this one one of the first books I bought - its remained the one I turn to over and over again - especially when friends or relatives questions how healthy a vegetarian diet is and I need to educate them. Some of the most fascinating parts of this book talk about the history of the current meat-based diet and how the government pushed it and helped market meats of all sorts to get people to buy more (to help farmers out). Also though there is great info on how much protien a person actually needs and where you can get it from - its actually pretty easy to get all the protien you need over the course of a day. Since becoming vegetarian (really almost vegan except for the eggs I get from a lady down the street who really takes wonderful care of her chickens) I've never felt better. My husband has even voluntarily made the switch as well (spurred on by a few episodes of food poisoning at the local sandwich shop). Vegetarian is the way to go and this book will give you ALL the info you need to get rolling and keep others quiet when they criticize. Bon sante and Bon appetit!