Book Review: Clean Start - Inspiring You To Eat Clean and Live Well

We are barely into the new year and many of us have already ditched our New Year’s resolutions. Well don’t despair. Author Terry Walters gives us a second chance to improve our diets with her latest book, Clean Start: Inspiring You to Eat Clean and Live Well. This book features over 100 vegan and gluten free recipes organized seasonally. Each recipe uses only healthy, fresh ingredients and most are quick and easy to prepare. Many of the recipes also feature full page photographs by Gentl and Hyers.

Throughout the book, Terry Walters stresses the importance of eating “Clean Food” – food that is whole, minimally processed, and close to the source for maximum nutrition. She is, indeed, dedicated to this pursuit. In addition to her books on this subject, she also has a blog, “Eat Clean, Live Well,” she serves on the board of directors of Urban Oaks Organic Farm – one of the largest urban organic farms in the country, and she has trained at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition.

Clean Start begins by making a compelling case for “Eating Clean.” It lists a simple set of recommendations for improving your diet and also provides a litany of benefits for both you and the environment:

• Eat the colors of the rainbow. The more colorful your diet, the more nutrient rich.
• Eat dark leafy greens every day. Try using a variety of greens to amp up the nutritional value of your salads, soups, sauces, stir-fries and even smoothies.
• Eat all five tastes. Sweet, sour, salty, bitter and pungent are all found naturally and nutritionally in clean food.
• Eat foods that are grown, not manufactured. Clean food comes from a green plant, not a processing plant – a farm, not a factory.
• Skip the package. A package is the first sign that you’ve moved away from the source. Look for foods that don’t require a label to reveal what is inside.
• Buy clean food and leave the rest behind. Make the difficult choice just once at the store so you’re not faced with making it every time you open your cupboard.
• Buy and try one new clean food each time you shop. One new clean food a week and by the end of a year you’ll be feeling the benefits of eating clean and living well.
• Know the source of your food. Make friends with your grocer, your farmer and your local producers. Understanding where and how food was grown or produced is essential to making healthy choices.
• Buy local and organic when you can. Clean food is fresh and nutrient-rich. What you see is what you get – without a host of unwanted contaminants and byproducts that often accompany conventional growing, processing, and shipping.
• Be nourished by your food and make peace with your choices. Make conscious choices, enjoy every bite and let your food and mealtime nourish your entire being.

Benefits of a Clean Start

• The best benefit of a clean food diet is that you’re going to love your food and your mealtime. Here is just a small sample of what else you stand to gain. Other potential benefits include increased energy and vitality, a strengthened immune system, reduced inflammation, reduced acidity, greater heart health, improved mental focus, reduced risk of diabetes, healthy weight control, better absorption of vitamins and minerals, less exposure to genetically modified foods, pesticides, and growth hormones, and fewer complications from food sensitivities.
• Impact on the environment include less packaging, less waste, less contamination, improved local environment and economy, increase in local jobs, maintains unique local foods, maintains crop diversity, creates a sustainable food system, less overproduction of soy, corn, and beets and less dependence on genetically modified food.

Finally, Terry Walters helps you get there by describing the tools needed, how to build a Clean Start pantry, and by providing valuable information about basic grains, legumes, greens, and vegetable stock. She also provides links to websites that can help you to source local ingredients for your recipes. These include:

• Slow Food - www.slowfood.com
• Local Harvest - www.localharvest.org
• Environmental Working Group - www.ewg.org
• American Farmland Trust - www.farmland.org
  

In our review of Clean Start, we tried three recipes: Herb Roasted Cauliflower with Shiitake Mushrooms, Pear Cake, and Asian Spinach with Peanut Ginger Sauce. The Herb Roasted Cauliflower was a fast, easy, and healthy dish. This method of pan roasting is gaining popularity among busy, working families (see interview with Chef Tyler Florence) and a key technique to master in order to prepare fast and healthy meals. The Asian Spinach was another all-around great side dish that works with almost any meal. Walters also provides a variation of this recipe if peanut allergies are a concern in your family. The steps required to prepare the Pear Cake were a little more involved but the end result was an outstanding dessert with just the right amount of natural sweetness provided by the grated pears and mashed bananas. We give Clean Start four stars out of five.

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