Cooking the Realage Way: Turn Back Your Biological Clock with More Than 80 Delicious and Easy Recipes [Hardcover]

To put my review in perspective for you I have been focused on food and cooking for the last 25 years. I have been reading anything about nutrition and health for the last 10 years. Additionally, I was a hospital administrator for just under 2 decades. So I know the effect that unhealthy lifestyle decisions can make on the human body. If you are a new student of health or nutrition this is an excellent place to begin your research.

I enjoyed the predecessor to this book "The Real Age Makeover". I appreciated the doctor's unique approach to healthy food and lifestyle and the way that he tried to quantify specific changes on your health by using age. This book is a great tie in to the original book.

The author does cover the basic information from "The Real Age Makeover" in this book. If your don't want to read about the science of how the specific changes work, you can simply purchase this book "Cooking the Real Age Way" and skip the prior book. The author outlines the 27 practices for food choices that can bring about at Real Age reduction of 14 years. Many of these practices are common sense, like eat food that isn't processed. But some of the practices are less obvious, like eat 10 tablespoons of tomato sauce every week.

This book is geared to those that are kitchen beginners. The doctors explain many cooking techniques that experienced cooks think are second nature. But for those that are accustomed to relying on carry out these sections are critical to their success. The doctors also discuss how to effectively use the freezer so that ingredients are readily available for quick weeknight meals.

The authors do a nice job of detailing what should be included in a healthy pantry. If you are new to healthy cooking a healthy pantry is key to being able to make fast healthy meals for your family. Without healthy quick options at the ready it is so much easier to call for pizza or Chinese, and neither of these delivery options are particularly healthy.

The doctors also created tables of vegetables by season and detail what to look for in the specific fresh vegetable, how to use them, and why they are good for your health.

The recipe section of the book begins on page 155. The doctors also provide an exhaustive nutritional analysis. Every possible item is detailed included milligrams of specific vitamins and minerals. The recipes themselves are good, but not too exotic for the standard American palate. The directions are clearly written. The ingredients are available in your standard mega mart (Wegman's or Whole Foods) anywhere in the US.

If you need a go-to cookbook that is healthy this is a good choice. There are many other options available that you might also consider, my personal favorites are "The Professional Chef's Techniques of Healthy Cooking" by the Culinary Institute of America, and "Conscious Cuisine" by Cary Neff.

If you are new to cooking, and more specifically healthy cooking this is great book to get you started. If you have been cooking for a while, but want to cook more healthy meals for your family you should consider the two books I referenced in the last paragraph.

I love this book! Leftover smoked salmon? Shiitake Mushroom and Asparagus Frittata with Smoked Salmon. Bottled red peppers? Roasted Red Pepper and Kalamata Olive Sicilian Salad. All that winter squash in the supermarket? Pistachio Pilaf with Butternut Squash and Gingered Cranberry Sauce.

It's amazing to find a cookbook where flavor is treated as important as health. There are no trans fats. There is little saturated fat. And there is little sugar, and lots of Omega-3 oils, flavonoids, and antioxidants, and creative ways to use fruits and vegetables and fish and soy and nuts. Even chocolate desserts!

I have tons of cookbooks--Ornish, South Beach, Atkins, Weil on the diet side, and Trotter, Keller, Boulud, Julia, Joy of on the cooking side. And this one combines the best of healthiness with great flavor. Plus the lists of what is in season when---makes it easy to choose.

Each recipe also gives what is in each recipe that is good for you---I never knew that lycopene was beneath the skin of the tomato! Golden Banana Pancakes with Fresh Raspberries are awesome for breakfast; my kids love Chocolate Strawberry Sundaes.

La Puma is a practicing physician and a professionally trained chef---he worked at Topolobampo in Chicago with Rick Bayless for 4 years while practicing as a doctor! The meals he created will change how you think about the flavor of food that's good for you. He and Dr. Roizen examine the food-related factors that can cause us to age faster than we should, and demonstrate how even small changes in food choices can slow aging. La Puma's web page has some of these recipes for free. Plus, he's cute!

Pros: Nice recipes, with extensive nutritional information for each recipe. If you are looking, for example, to increase your potassium intake, you'll find that information, along with many other micronutirents, listed for each recipe.

Cons: The recipes only occupy the second half of the book. They are organized by season, so if you want to look at breakfast dishes, for example, you need to flip backwards and forwards through the book as they are located in multiple places.

The first half of the book assumes you are a complete idiot from Mars, and is taken up with pages and pages of detailed descriptions of every conceivable kitchen tool and how to use it. If you have never used a corkscrew, purchased a cooking pot, or handled a pancake turner, this is the book for you. The authors proceed in the same fashion with their list of required "pantry" items. The list goes on for a seeming eternity, describing everything you never thought you would have to be told about salt, pepper, flour, rice, and other pantry staples.

Another gripe is about the recipes themselves. After extensive intros extolling the goal of simplifying meal preparation by use of simple methods and few ingredients, I find many of the recipes have too many ingredients and doubtful prep times. For example, a recipe with a prep time of 10 minutes may list ten different ingredients, many of which require washing, chopping, peeling, mixing, as well as grilling and other stove-top work. Not to mention the shopping, since you may not happen to have the 6 kalamata olives and 1 tablespoon of fresh basil in your pantry.

About one third of the book is taken up with pages and pages of dubious questionaires about your lifestyle choices and their supposed effect on your "real age." All of these questionaires are listed not once, but TWICE, effectively increasing the annoyance factor by tenfold, as well as doubling the weight of the book.

The basic premise of following a Mediterranean type diet seems to be upheld by dietary studies. But the "real age" concept (eg. eat 12 tablespoons of some ingredient 4 times per month will reduce your "real age" by say, 5 years) seems mainly an attention-getting device. Every recipe in the book is accompanied by a "real age" effect - eat this recipe 6 times per year and reduce your "real age" by, say, 2.7 years.

The book would be more effective by slimming down by about two thirds, simply extolling the virtues of a Mediterranean diet, cutting out all the questionaires, kitchen and pantry sections, and simply focusing on the recipes.