Make your meals simple and healthy

Page 21

Meals for Good Health

By Karen Graham

Canadian Diabetes Association

$29.95, 232 pages (hc)

A book by registered dietitian and diabetes educator Karen Graham, in co-operation with the Canadian Diabetes Association, takes the guesswork out of meal planning.

Meals for Good Health features 60 recipes that are not only fast and easy, but low in fat and sugar as well, and provides meal plans that will help manage diabetes and heart disease.

The book, Graham said, was reviewed over a three-year period by Aboriginal Community Health Representatives and nutritionists working on reserves, Elders from a friendship centre and Aboriginal women attending literacy centres. The book includes recipes for a hamburger soup and bannock meal, and uses other favorite foods such as wild meat, wieners, cabbage, corn and berries as options or parts of other meals.

Meals for Good Health also discusses, in plain language, ideas for making changes to an unhealthy lifestyle. The chapter on healthy living includes tips on eating less fat, drinking more water, walking for health, choosing fibre and limiting the elements in a meal that contribute to diabetes and heart disease - sugar, salt and alcohol. The book also provides alternatives to milk for those people who are lactose intolerant, a common disorder seen in the Aboriginal community.

Lose weight without dieting, feel and look healthier than ever before, and reduce the risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer by using the easy to read information in the book which features full-color photographs of a month of calorie-equivalent meals.

The book is available in independent and chain bookstores, Shoppers Drug Marts, some Costco, Overwaitea, Save-On-Foods, gift shops, pharmacies and other retail outlets and from the Canadian Diabetes Association chapters. There is also a website to visit at: www.nald.ca/meals.htm

Author Graham lives in Portage la Prairie, Man., works as a consultant for Prairie Nutrition Services, and has delivered nutrition services to First Nations communities.

As well as Meals for Good Health, Graham has written Nutritional Care for the Elderly, published in 1982, Food Irradiation, A Canadian Folly, published in 1992 and the Manitoba Health Nutrition Resource Guide, published last year.