"The doctor told him that the very low-sodium diet is the main thing responsible for his success and I couldn't wait to share it with you."
"When I said that your book saved my husband's life, I meant it. "
The first cookbook was s surprise to medical professionals and their patients alike. Doctors have always believed that no one could ever get below 2,000 milligrams of sodium in a daily diet. "Keep it at that level," Don's doctor told the sixty-three-year-old Gazzaniga in 1997. He had diagnosed his patient's problem as congestive heart failure and was ready to sign him up for the only solution believed possible, a heart transplant.
To Don, this was a challenge. Relying on a lot of research, the help of nutritionist daughter Jeannie, and his familiarity with the cuisines of many different countries, Don spent many hours in the kitchen and came up with a large selection of recipes and a twenty-eight-day menu plan that never went above five hundred milligrams of sodium a day! Yep! That's five-hundred. And the food was/is delicious.
The recipes in that first diet were gathered in a general cookbook that told readers just about everything they needed to know: where to find the right ingredients, how to make tasty substitutions that did not raise the sodium level, and more, with the sodium count give for each ingredient and each recipe.
That was The No-Salt, Lowest-Sodium Cookbook. Don decided to embellish the general work with some specialties and, with his wife, Maureen, created The No-Salt, Lowest Sodium Baking book. If anyone thinks that you can't make delicious bread and pies and cookies and other baked goodies with very little no sodium, try a few of Don's recipes.
But suppose you want to celebrate your grandson's third birthday on your doctor's latest green light, with a party and need delicious tidbits for the guests. Here they are in his new book. Sometimes you feel lik a light lunch --a salad, a sandwich, a bowl of soup....Here they are. There are sections explaining where to buy special flavorings and the like, how to substitute low-sodium or sodium free ingredients, and a foreword by Dr. Michael Fowler, director of the Stanford Heart Transplant Program and medical director of the Stanford Cardiomyopathy center.
