Customer Reviews

The New American Diet System

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Dr. and Mrs Connor are, respectively, a world-class lipidologist who teaches at the Oregon Health Sciences University, and an amazingly competent dietician who cooks each recipe in this book 5-6 times herself. The Connors devised a method by which you may determine, by means of a single number, to what extent a particular food is good or bad for your arteries (foods ranging from fruits to Big Macs) - it is called the CSI or Cholesterol Saturated Fatty Acid Index. You use the book as a reference or as a cookbook: pages of foods are listed by category, with their CSI, and number of grams of fat; the recipes are well-written and tasty. The index is complete and easy to access. I use this book constantly for the education of my patients with hyperlipidemia.

This book was/is extremely helpful to me as an individual recently diagnosed with idiopathic cardiomyopathy. I do have a degree in Biology, but I think this book would be just a readable if I did not. Not only does the extensive list of foods and their CSI numbers help me on a daily basis, but also the recipes which designate the fat content, fiber, calories, salt, CSI number, and number of servings and/or serving size. I am a member of Weight Watchers because I recognize that even being overweight a little adds extra capillaries to be pumped through to feed that fat, putting additional work on the heart. The calories, fat content, fiber, and serving size are needed in Weight Watchers to use their point system. I'm also on a salt-restricted diet ...another content number given. I originally checked this book out at the public library. I am now ordering it on Amazon.com. I've researched a number of books via the library but only ordered a few. That should tell you how valuable this book is to me. Thanks!

I purchased this book on the advice of a dietitian, with the goal of lowering my husband's cholesterol. It has lots of minuses and a few pluses. I am constantly scribbling my own comments on the recipes, because they do not appear to be carefully tested or thoughtfully written. For example, some recipes say simply to put the ingredients in a baking dish, without specifying that you lightly oil it or use a nonstick one, and then at serving time the food sticks disastrously to the dish. With other recipes, after several tries -- first following the recipe verbatim, then adding my own variations to punch it up -- I have crossed them out as hopelessly dull. Another problem I have with this book is the binding, as many of the pages detached themselves in a short time. Finally, I have to nail them for listing as separate recipes "Skinny Burgers" and "Very Skinny Burgers," when the only difference is the amount of ground beef used. (Hello? Editors? Anybody there?) That said, there are some lovely recipes that even my fussy husband enjoys (e.g., curried chicken and peanut salad, homemade ramen, and oysters in crusty French bread), even though he often threatens to burn the book or throw it in the garbage.