Customer Reviews

Raising Low-Fat Kids in a High-Fat World

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This is a very well-written book. I originally borrowed it from the library and decided right away that I wanted my own copy. It explains how to alter your diet from a typical high-fat American diet to a lower-fat, healthy one without a mutiny from your family.

It was eye-opening to learn how to read nutrition labels on packaged foods so that I really understood how much fat was in the things I was eating. It was also immensely helpful to see WHY certain ingredients (like hydrogenated oils) are bad for you. There are lots of great recipes in this book, and also demonstrations of how you can change recipes you are already using so that they will be lower in fat. There's plenty of info on what kinds of healthy, low-fat foods you can feed your children for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, and on how you can still eat out without consuming tons of saturated fats.

The only thing I found frustrating about this book was the focus on replacing high-fat dairy products with other dairy prodcuts. As someone who is allergic to all dairy, I would hope for some suggestions of non-dairy ingredients with which to replace cheeses and cream, especially since dairy products are so laden with saturated fats. Otherwise, I found this to be a very helpful book.

I have red so many health books over the years and Raising Low Fat Kids in a High Fat World is the only one which not only presents the food facts but gives you easy steps on how to get your whole family to embrace dietary changes. Judith Shaw understands that food changes cannot be dictated to ones family but must be made in partnership with them and she provides sound advice on how to achieve this. Her recipes and ideas for food replacements and recipe alterations are fabulous and reflect the wealth of her cooking experience (Judith apprenticed at Chez Panisse for three years). When discussing the facts about fact Judith includes information on the dangers of hydrogenated oils (a kind of fat I was not previously aware of) and aptly describes them as the "food industry's Trojan horse". The tables of cooking times for grains and legumes are also very useful. This book was a great help to my husband and I

This is a unique book on how to change your family's diet without fights or deprivation. Judith Shaw, a wise psychotherapist and a marvelous cook, leads the reader through the reasons to change a family's food toward a healthy, lowfat pattern, and she takes the reader through all the necessary steps to accomplish this. I love the attention she gives to favorite foods and children's reactions to change. With this book, you can enlist the whole family in the adventure of finding a better way to eat

Being an avid lover of fine food, I have been battling with my weight since I was a child, back then, people talked about a healthy balanced diet, but it just seemed to be duplicitous way of saying - everything you enjoy eating is bad for you and you have to starve to be thin. Later when I started to grow, my weight suddenly shed off, I thought my luck had changed, I was no longer fat, but I was always hungry, and I never had the energy to do sport after school without falling asleep in class the next day. It was at about that time that the diet craze began. Almost every week you would here of some new diet, eat more of this less of that, but all it seemed to do was create confusion, and more and more kids were getting fatter, not thinner. By the time I hit twenty, the weight came back. So I tried to diet, eating less, but surprise, surprise, nothing worked. Now finally in my early thirties the weight is coming off. It all started with "The Zone" by Barry Sears, I finally understood what I should be eating and why, but Barry Sears book has few recipes to speak of and my family simply wouldn't put up with the sudden change and the awful food that I was imposing on them. It wasn't until we got Judith Shaw's book, that we really started to enjoy eating healthy low-fat food. Judith is a wonderful cook and she has plenty of ideas to help you transform your old family favorite recipes into lean and tasty cuisine. But best of all, she has a great deal of experience as a therapist working with families. Her tips on how to win the rest of your family over, are as important as her recipes. This book is for any family that wants to be healthy but enjoys to eat

As Judith is my mother, I grew up as one of her many test subjects. Learning to convert our kitchen on our own was difficult at times - I remember many a terrible meal that was quickly replaced with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But as the years went by our home grew to be the "talk of the town" as the best "non heart attack" (as it was called back then) meal ever! I live in Los Angeles now and enjoy entertaining a great deal. My friends are constantly amazed at the low fat and delicious meals that I produce. Many of my friends have children now and all enjoy the book immensly as I always give it as a gift. I have never learned to cook with butter and am constantly trying to eliminate it from receipies that sound yummy. Thankfully I can always pick up the phone and ask Mom should my own talents fail me. You can too! She's is full of great ideas as you will find in the book and you will learn to adapt your own receipies after a while!