Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Book Review: Passionate Nutrition by Jennifer Adler with Jess Thomson







Members of the Vise Library were selected to participate in a blog tour for Passionate Nutrition.  We received a copy of Jennifer Adler's book for an honest review.

About the book:

This power foods healthy living guidebook will inspire readers will eat well, lose weight, and embrace food as medicine. “Food as medicine” is a powerfully healing way to eat and was embraced by nutritionist Jennifer Adler as she recovered from a malnour­ished childhood and adolescence. Part power-foods cookbook, part handbook for healthy living and eating, and part memoir, Passionate Nutrition provides digestible information, tips, and techniques for how to find your way to optimal health. She focuses on abundant eat­ing (as opposed to restrictive eating), and explores what she calls “the healthy trinity”—digestion, balance, and whole foods. Adler guides and encourages readers to shift their diet to achieve this desirable bal­ance, introduces power foods we should all eat, and provides healthy ways to lose weight, along with simple recipes to optimize health. With her personal story interwoven, readers will be inspired to embrace the healthy power of food.


With so many diet and nutrition books out there to read, it can be hard to figure out what is really accurate.  One book can tell you to not eat any carbs and another will tell you not to eat a lot of red meat.  With that being said, Jennifer Adler's advice comes from personal experience.  She talks about how she was very sickly as a child and from her experience of eating to get well.  She offers a lot of great tips and ideas from her own experiences that have worked for her and others.  Nothing in this book seems overly complex or unrealistic.  In one of the chapters Adler talks about just by looking at a person, often times she can pinpoint nutritional issues that cause them.  For instance she discusses contributing factors to acne or dandruff.  

This book is more than just a nutritional book.  There are recipes included and stories about her own life that had to be hard to put in a book.  She gives beauty tips and how to eat for energy or deficiencies in your diet.  She also discusses how the right foods improve your health but in a round about way can improve emotional well-being.  Jennifer discusses different types of eaters to help you identify what kind of person you are (are you always on the goal or do you try to self-sabotage yourself with food?).  I do not know why, but there was a bullet point that really stuck with me about restaurants. She mentions that the reason that higher end restaurant's food tastes better is because they use higher-end ingredients.  Everything is usually fresh.  However, some of the restaurants that are not as expensive use shelf-stable foods (or frozen) and lower quality vegetables.  This seems like general knowledge due to price and cost saving measures on the lower qualities business side.  However, most people cannot afford to go out to eat at the more expensive restaurants on a regular basis.  She suggests people use those types of restaurants as celebratory meals.  Again, this seems like general knowledge.  However, I know I am guilty for going not necessarily a fast food restaurant but an affordable sit-down restaurant because sometimes that is just easy.  However, sometimes I need to really think about what is better for me in the long run as far as what I put in my body.  This is a great handbook with lots of bullet points and dinner ideas.  It explains certain types of food and why they are good for your health.  The chapters are broken up so that it easy to find something that you want to reference back to later on.  I loved how everything was explained in layman's terms!  If you are looking for a nutritional book with a little more than telling you to eat this or that, look into this book!


Buy the book:
·        Amazon Kindle: http://amzn.to/1pLkEBP
·        Amazon Hardcover: http://amzn.to/1lhRBGm








About the authors:


Jennifer Adler is a Certified Nutritionist in the State of Washington, an adjunct faculty member at Bastyr University, and co-founder of the International Eating Disorders Institute. She holds a Master's of Science in Clinical Nutrition and Counseling and a Graduate Certificate in Spirituality, Health and Medicine from Bastyr University. She was trained at the School of Natural Cookery in Boulder, CO. She lives on Bainbridge Island, WA.

Jess Thomson is a Seattle-based freelance writer and cookbook author who has written for Sunset, Cooking Light, Edible Seattle, and Seattle Met magazines.

Connect with the author:
·        Facebook: http://on.fb.me/VEXfWH
·        Twitter: https://twitter.com/JenniferAdler

·        Website: http://www.passionatenutrition.com





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