Eat Well Live Well with High Cholesterol: Low-cholesterol Recipes and Tips [Paperback]

I was looking for a cookbook with creative recipes that focus on flavor while limiting the amount of unhealthy ingredients. I am not a nutritionist so I cannot speak to the accuracy of the information contained in the first 27 pages of the book. I love to cook and love delicious food. In the past I've adopted favorite recipes by eliminating egg yolks, switching to healthy oils rather than butter, limiting cheese, using fat free dairy products and increasing the use of whole grains when preparing everyday meals.

Making these small changes make a big difference in the nutritional make-up without radically changing many of the dishes I prepare. I should also add that my family is not on a strict diet to lower cholesterol; it is something I attempt to quietly slip into our life whenever possible. My goal is to keep food flavorful and healthy. There are special events, parties, birthdays, holidays where those concerns are put aside and I indulge and use whole eggs, butter and cream, but I try to balance that the majority of the time with an eye to healthy eating. I hoped this book would provide some interesting new recipes. For my purposes, the book is disappointing.

The text is divided into the following sections - Lower Cholesterol the Healthy Way, Breakfast, Snacks and Starters, Soups and Salads, Main Meals, Vegetarian Meals, Sweet Things, Contact Information and the Index. There are approximately 95 recipes and 37 photographs of the actual dishes, most of which, with the exception of pictured soups, smoothies, quick breads, etc., do not look very appetizing. The Vegetable and Polenta Pie photograph shows thin wedges of polenta looking very dry with very burned tips. Many dishes look like piles of almost unidentifiable ingredients. My significant other looked at the photos and said he'd rather die of high cholesterol than eat the pictured food. Usually I complain about the lack of photographs in cookbooks, but in this case, less may be more.

I really had to search to find a couple of recipes to try. I settled on two relatively safe recipes -- Oaty Buckwheat Pancakes and Spiced Pumpkin and Lentil Soup. The pancakes turned out fine, as did the soup although I played with the seasonings. Both recipes were certainly edible, so no complaints but no gushing, either.

The extensive use of self-rising flours is a puzzle. Most grocery stores carry only all-purpose self-rising flour. This cookbook has recipes using self-rising flour, stone ground self-rising flour, stone ground whole wheat self-rising flour and whole wheat self-rising flour. In the first section of the book, the formula for converting regular flour to self-rising is discretely noted, but the user may miss this bit of information. In an effort to be user friendly, why not convert the recipes before publication and leave the self-rising flour out altogether? After all it is just flour with added baking powder and a little salt.

The only chocolate recipe in the book is Reduced Fat Chocolate Cake with Strawberries. It requires a kugelhopf pan. Do you own a kugelhopf pan? Well, I do but only because I collect every bundt pan I can find. Since the recipe isn't illustrated, I have added a picture of it in the customer images section. My question is why, with chocolate being such a popular flavor and there only being one chocolate recipe in the entire book, create a cake requiring such an obscure pan? Why not use a pan that almost everyone owns -- a 8 x 8 or 9 x 13 or a 9 inch layer cake pan?

The font size looks like 10 point, ink color is black and it is bold in the recipe title and ingredients, then pale in the instructions making those sections more difficult to read. This was probably done in an effort to discourage photocopying. Included is prep time, cooking time, number of servings and nutritional information. The book is a paperback so it won't remain open when turned to a particular recipe, making a cookbook holder a necessity.

The nutritional data included for each recipe is not complete. Although energy calories, fat, saturated fat, protein, carbohydrate, fiber, cholesterol and sodium are stated, grams of sugar are not included. Since this is a figure that is a concern to many, the omission is disappointing. Software programs are used to calculate the nutritional information so including the sugar grams would require little effort and provide useful information and paint a more complete picture of the health attributes of each recipe - even in a book focusing on cholesterol. I wish I could rate the book three and a half stars, but since there are no half stars, I settled on three. Although the flaws are not fatal, the book could have been so much more. If possible, take a look at the book before buying.