I like to let my readers know of good reads in the area of family-related food, health and nutrition. I’m going to be gradually expanding the recommended books in my product section. These are books I find credible, well written and sometimes life-changing.

One way you can support this site is to click on one of the links and buy any product from Amazon. As these are affiliate links, Raise Healthy Eaters will get a (very) small percentage. This is one way you can support this site and help it grow into the premier destination for family nutrition.

Over the past year I’ve worked hard to build trust with my readers. I would never tell you I like a product when I don’t. Most of the books I review I seek out myself, knowing they are very likely to be credible and worth your time. I aim to bring the best expert advice to you!

Below are a few books I’ve been meaning to review — and decided to review them all at once. Got a book you highly recommend? Let me know about it!

Baby Bites: Everything You Need to Know About Feeding Babies & Toddlers in One Handy Book

Bridget Sweeney, MS, RD, has written a manual on nutrition for babies and toddlers. She goes through each nutrition stage including liquids (0-6 months), adding solids (6-12 months) and toddler feeding.
She includes tips on everything from how to make baby food to pleasing picky eaters. She also includes recipes.

Baby Bites is a comprehensive book with credible information that any new parent can benefit from. While I also like Super Baby Food and First Meals, I highly recommend parents have at least one childhood nutrition book written by an RD. This one definitely makes the grade.

100 Questions & Answers About Anorexia Nervosa

When I interviewed Sari Shepphird for my eating disorder prevention series, she sent me her book, 100 Questions & Answers About Anorexia Nervosa. This is a very thoughtful and thorough book that aims to educate parents and patients dealing with this very serious disease. As I learned from the series, the first step parents should take is educating themselves about this disease.

100 Questions & Answers starts with the definition of anorexia, how it is diagnosed and discusses the potential causes. Shepphird covers a variety of topics including warning signs, treatment and how to prevent relapses. This is well written and research-based book that is a must-read for anyone who has had anorexia touch their lives.

Expect the Best: Your Guide to Healthy
Eating Before, During, and After Pregnancy

The American Dietetic Association teams up with Elizabeth Ward, dietitian and mom, to bring women a scientifically-sound book on pregnancy nutrition. Expect the Best covers it all. What to eat before, during and after pregnancy, motherly wisdom from moms who’ve been there, how to find a prenatal vitamin, how much caffeine to drink (or not), whether or not artificial sweeteners are safe, how much and types of fish to eat, specific nutrients that are needed, meal plans and more.

This book takes the confusion out of what to eat during pregnancy. Instead of asking your friends if it’s okay to eat or drink something, just go to this book to get the latest, credible information.

I wholeheartedly believe that raising healthy eaters starts when a couple first thinks about becoming pregnant. Expect the Best should be on the bookshelf of every woman wanting a child or that is already pregnant.

Gearing up for baby number two or three? See Elizabeth Ward’s guest post on your pre-conception to-do list.

Havoc at the Hillside Market

I won a blogging contest a few months ago and received this book in the mail. Now it is one of my 3-year old’s favorite before-bed books.

Mellissa Halas-Liang, dietitian and creator of Super Kids Nutrition, writes about the Super Crew who have super powers by eating super fruits and vegetables (I said super four times!). This story begins at the Farmer’s Market where the Super Crew load up on their favorite fruits and veggies. They run into some questionable characters and use their super powers to get out of it.

The goal of this book, as Halas-Liang points out, is to pique your child’s interest in trying new fruits and vegetables. The end of the book contains tips and a recipe for Happy Face Pizza. This is a creative way to help children develop a positive view of nutritious foods.

Okay, it’s time to reveal the new cookbook I’ve been raving about. Just so you know, I’m usually not a big cookbook person. I still buy them from time to time but I’m usually disappointed when the touted quick and easy recipes are really more involved and time-consuming.

This is one of the reasons I love SOS! The Six O’Clock Scramble to the Rescue: Earth-Friendly, Kid-Pleasing Dinners for Busy Families Cookbook. Many of the meals are Scramble Express meaning they can be made in 30 minutes or less. And Aviva Goldfarb, the author and busy mom, denotes the meals that can be made ahead of time or frozen.

For some reason, I find the meals in SOS especially appealing. I’ve already tried the Ravioli, Spinach with Sun Dried Tomatoes and the Crispy Parmesan-Panko Crusted Chicken Cutlets. I can’t wait to make the Orzo Salad with Peas and Feta Cheese and the Mango and Black Bean Salad to use as sides for some upcoming BBQs.

I also love the structure of the book. Golfarb, who runs The Scramble Meal Planning System, provides weekly menu plans and recipes based on what’s in season. The beginning of the book contains a seasonal fruit and veggie guide and other helpful suggestions like how to stock your pantry (wasn’t I just talking about this?).

I also really, really, really appreciate having the suggested sides which includes easy and nutritious salad and veggie ideas. Each section of the cookbook has tips for families including school lunch ideas, easy composting for families, best dishes for school potlucks and much more.

The only thing that’s missing from this cookbook are pictures but I can live without that. It really is an amazing resource for busy families. It’s a must-have book for every family’s kitchen!

Because the nice folks at the Six O’Clock Scramble sent me two books, I’m going to give one away for free! Here’s what you have to do to enter the cookbook giveaway:

1) Leave a comment saying why you need more quick and healthy meal ideas.

2) For another entry, sign up for Raise Healthy Eaters’ email updates or RSS Feed. If you already subscribe, tell at least one friend about Raise Healthy Eaters. Leave another comment saying what you did.

3) To increase your chances further, become a facebook fan. If you are already a fan (now called like), suggest some of your friends become fans. Leave another comment saying what you did.

4) And for a bonus entry, tweet, blog or share this post on Facebook. Again, let me know you did it by leaving another comment.

This giveaway will end next Friday the 4th at midnight. The winner will be picked at random.org. Good luck!

Today on her show Oprah will announce that she will never diet again. Many of us who embrace a non-diet approach to healthy living are doing the happy dance. We’ve seen Oprah struggle and have been waiting for the day she would learn to eat more intuitively – and use her platform to get the message out.

The person responsible for Oprah’s “aha” moment is Geneen Roth, the author of the new bestseller, Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything. Roth has gained and lost 1000 pounds in her lifetime bouncing between anorexia and obesity. When I heard of this book I rushed to the store and devoured it.

And, of course, I had to tell you all about it.

The premise
“No matter how developed you are in any other areas of your life, no matter what you say you believe, no matter how sophisticated or enlightened you think you are, how you eat says it all”

This is the crux of Roth’s message. After years of many highs and lows in both her weight and emotional state, she decided to give up the struggle with food and her body. She not only naturally fell to the right weight for her, she found her true self in the process.

Roth is not new to writing books or helping women conquer their issues with food. But for the first time the mainstream might be ready for what she has to say. Having Oprah’s endorsement is a major plus, but it helps that many women are tiring of the endless quest for the perfect weight, body and diet.

The concepts in Women Food and God, like food, take some time to digest and absorb. It’s the kind of book you want to read and then re-read. What one woman takes from it, another will completely miss. But this is what makes it such a wonderful and potentially life-changing read (and the perfect book club pick!).

The why of eating
Roth eloquently explains why there is more to overeating, weight problems and food obsessions than people think. (And if food or weight is not your issue, you can still relate what she says to almost any “obsession,” whether it be shopping, over-working, people pleasing or worrying. Men can enjoy this book too).

Obsessions about weight and food, Roth explains, take us away from our true selves:

“Compulsive eating is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be. I tell them that ending the obsession with food is all about the capacity to stay in the present moment. To not leave themselves.”

Of course there are differing degrees of eating for non-hunger reasons. One person may eat out of boredom or stress while another eats out of sheer dissatisfaction with life. Roth explains that when we learn to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, instead of trying to flee them, we become more in touch with our true selves. And the weight part takes care of itself:

“When you stop struggling, stop suffering, stop pushing and pulling yourself around food and your body, when you stop manipulating and controlling, when you actually relax and listen to the truth of what is there, something bigger than your fear will catch you.”

This bigger-than-your-fear is what Roth describes as God. She admits that God will mean different things to different people. Roth explains that the lessons learned from suffering, the same things we try desperately to hide from, is the gateway to love and holiness. And she believes our relationship with food can lead us there.

I often write about parents raising kids to have a healthy relationship with food by how they feed. But this book reminds me that teaching kids its okay to feel — and learn from — difficult feelings is also important.

How to eat
Towards the end of the book Roth discusses her “eating guidelines” which are not a set of strict rules but rather a very simplistic way to eat. The key is to eat with awareness and listen to your body (not your mind):

“When I first realized how simple it was to end the compulsion with food — eat what your body wants when you’re hungry, stop when you’ve had enough — I felt as if I had popped out of life as I knew it and suddenly found myself in another galaxy.”

When Roth first started eating whatever she wanted she ran to the very foods she wasn’t allowed to eat on many diets. In her sugar-induced state, she realized it wasn’t food she was looking for:

“I needed to prove to myself that what I wanted most was not forbidden, but what I didn’t understand was that I didn’t want the cookies; I wanted the way being allowed to have them made me feel: welcomed, deserving, adored.”

Roth says that when women stop listening to their minds, and start tuning into their bodies, they find it doesn’t want a bunch of cookies, cake, loaves of bread or salty foods. It wants to be nurtured with wholesome food. It wants to move. It needs sleep and self-care.

Moving away from diets and bodily perfection, ironically, make us healthier, stronger and inherently more beautiful.

I highly recommend this book to all women but realize it may not be for everyone. If you get the chance, tune into to Oprah today or record the show. Listening to Geneen Roth just might change your mind — and your life.

If you’re like me then you are nowhere near done with your holiday shopping. To help you last-minute shoppers, I decided to share some new books from the blog world. I haven’t read these books yet but because I follow these blogs I know what to expect:

Erin, a mom of three boys, created www.5dollardinners.com. I found this site in my search for easy and nutritious recipes. I like to save money too but that’s not why I follow this blog (although it should be). Erin often “healthifies” her recipes and includes plenty of fruits and vegetables from her garden. Some of my favorites include her fruit and veggie muffins and a recipe she found for lentil and brown rice casserole. Because of the popularity of her blog, she recently came out with her first book The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook: 200 Recipes for Quick, Delicious, and Nourishing Meals That Are Easy on the Budget and a Snap to Prepare. This is a great idea for parents looking to fix nutritious and economical meals.

Stephanie, a soon-to-be mom of three, created A Year of Slow Cooking in 2008 when she made a New Years’ Resolution to use the slow cooker every day. I’ve recently tried some of the recipes from her site including one for lemon and dill salmon with spinach and I loved it. (Yes, it is possible to cook fish in the slow cooker.) Her recipes prove that slow cooker recipes ain’t what they used to be. Her book, Make It Fast, Cook It Slow: The Big Book of Everyday Slow Cooking, is the perfect gift for any busy mom with a crock-pot. For an even better idea, buy a crock-pot with the book!

And last is Naveen (twintoddlersdad) a dad of toddler twins. He created www.littlestomaks.com to help parents through the maze of feeding their toddlers. He has a variety of experts on his blog and is revealing their tips in the ebook, Expert Nutrition Tips for Your Toddler. And the best part is 100% of the proceeds go to Share Your Strength to help end world hunger. So you get some good tips while helping kids in need at the same time!

Hopefully that will give you some ideas as the holiday stress gets more intense. Have a safe and happy holiday!

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I spoke with a woman recently who told me that she was a skinny, picky-eating kid. Food was always an issue at her home and her concerned parent constantly brought her to the doctor (who had her take a slew of vitamins). Now, many years later, she’s battling her weight right along with her siblings.

Lately I’ve been talking to a lot of moms about picky eating. While some toddlers are more prone to being finicky, most children will go through this stage to some degree. It’s a very normal part of development. Luckily, there’s a book to help moms deal with this challenging stage of development.

Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense is the last of the Ellyn Satter books I plan to review. And it happens to be my favorite. Satter explains each stage of development as it relates to eating starting at infancy and moving through the preschool age. Unfortunately she stops at age five so moms of older children miss out.

In addition to being a dietitian, Satter is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW). Her real-life accounts of families struggling with a variety of eating problems help the reader immensely. While most of her advice comes down to the Division of Responsibility of feeding (parents decide the what, when and where of feeding and children decide the how much of eating), understanding the big picture of childhood eating will certainly enlighten any mom.

This book taught me that how I feed my kids is as important as what I feed them. While following her advice has not been easy, I’ve already seen it pay off. I have to admit there have been times when I’ve wanted to tell my daughter “come here and finish your dinner missy!” But if I did that enough, she’d learn to eat for the wrong reasons.

The downside to Child of Mine is that some of the nutrition information isn’t up-to-date because it was published in 2000. But the advice on how to feed is right on.

Have any picky-eating stories to share? We want to hear from you!

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Most moms are on a mission to get their kids to eat more vegetables. While my daughter used to throw back broccoli and cauliflower as a baby, she’s much more cautious with veggies these days.

I have a confession to make: I have a veggie complex. My cooked vegetables never seem to taste as good as they do in restaurants or from other cooks. So I’ve been on a quest to enhance the flavor of vegetables during cooking.

About a week ago, I got a present in the mail to help solve this problem.

Good Books, the publishers of the Fix-It and Forget-It series, sent me another book to review (last week I reviewed the Fix-It and Forget-It Big Cookbook). This book, Fix-It and Enjoy-It Healthy Cookbook, is different from the others in the series because it’s not for slow cookers. Instead, the book contains plant-based main and side dish recipes that are prepared in the oven or stove-top. And like the other Fix It books, all the recipes are submitted by home cooks.

Even though I’m a dietitian, I don’t necessarily search for “healthy” cookbooks, which is why I didn’t request this book in the first place. Instead, I seek recipes that appeal to me, and based on my taste preferences and nutritional knowledge, will sometimes make substitutions or additions. I personally think this tendency to categorize foods into “healthy” and “unhealthy” is counterproductive. But I’ll save that rant for another post.

Now back to the book…

I was pleasantly surprised to see so many creative ways to prepare vegetables and fresh fruit. Remember, these are home cooks experimenting and coming up with their own recipes. After seeing vegetable idea after vegetable idea, I had to calm myself down. For broccoli alone there’s Broccoli Dijon, Sesame Broccoli, Broccoli with Cranberries, Corn and Broccoli Bake, Roasted Broccoli and Italian-style Broccoli. That’s a lot of broccoli.

Overall, I’m impressed with the number of appealing fruit and vegetable recipes in this book. So if you’re struggling to come up with fruit and vegetable ideas, you might want to give it a try.

This week I tried Holiday Green Beans and they turned out tasty. Did my daughter eat them? No. But I’ll keep offering – and in the meantime my husband and I get more variety.

Got a tasty vegetable recipe? Please share!

Holiday Green Beans (I cut the recipe in half)

Makes: 10 servings
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 20-30 minutes

Ingredients
2 lbs (about 8 cups) fresh green beans
1 large red onion, thinly sliced
3 cloves fresh garlic, minced
1 tsp, olive oil
½ cup slivered almonds
Pepper to taste

1. Steam beans in saucepan until just slightly crisp.
2. Sauté onion and garlic in olive oil in large skillet for 3 minutes
3. Add beans to skillet. Sauté 1 minute
Add slivered almonds and pepper to beans. Toss together and then serve
 
“Reprinted from Fix-It and Enjoy-It Healthy Cookbook. Copyright by Good Books (www.GoodBooks.com). Used by permission. All rights reserved.”

A couple of years ago my mother-in-law bought me a crock-pot. The idea of putting a few ingredients in a pot and having a tasty dinner at the end of the day was intriguing to me. After all, I never really learned how to cook.

Since then, I have come to love the crock-pot and I rely on it at least once a week. I can even leave the recipe out for my husband, along with the ingredients, and he can put it all together. I always thought the slower cooker was only capable of making stew-like meals, but then I got a hold of a new cookbook…

The Fix It and Forget It book series focuses mainly on crock-pot cooking. The biggest of the bunch, Fix-It And Forget-It Big Cookbook: 1400 Best Slow Cooker Recipes has 1400 slow cooker recipes. What I like about it is all the recipes are sent in by home cooks. That means it’s full of recipes from moms like you and me experimenting and coming up with something delicious and easy. I also like that there are quite a number of “light” recipes that include the nutritional analysis. And because the meat is usually tender, it makes for a great option for small children who don’t do well with tougher meats.

There is a huge variety of recipes including lasagna, chicken (in a multitude of ways), appetizers, snacks, Mexican food, seafood and much more. I haven’t tested all the recipes but I recently made Herbed Chicken (see below) and it came out great.

I can’t wait to try more of the easy slow cooker recipes in this book. I’ll be sure to post some I like. If you have any easy crock-pot recipes, let other moms know about it by sending it through.

Herbed Chicken

Makes: 8 serving
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cooking Time: 2 ¼ -2 ¾ hours
Ideal slow cooker size: 5-Quart

4 whole chicken breasts, halved
10 ¾ ounce can cream of mushroom or chicken soup
¼ cup soy sauce
¼ cup oil
¼ cup wine vinegar
¾ cup water
½ tsp. minced garlic
1 tsp. ground ginger
½ tsp. dried oregano
1 Tbsp. brown sugar

1. Place chicken in slow cooker.
2. Combine remaining ingredients. Pour over chicken.
3. Cover. Cook on low 2-2 ½ hours. Uncover and cook 15 minutes or more. Serve with rice.

I used Uncle Ben’s whole grain rice that you can pop in the microwave. To reduce the fat you can remove the skin from the chicken.

“Reprinted from Fix-It and Forget-It BIG Cookbook. Copyright by Good Books (www.GoodBooks.com). Used by permission. All rights reserved.”

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Parents today are inundated with childhood obesity statistics. We are told that if our children are big they are likely to be overweight as adults. We are told that children are more overweight today than ever before in history. It’s no wonder that parents become anxious when their child starts moving up the growth chart. I mean, a parent cannot just will their child to be slender. Or can they?

My favorite childhood nutrition expert, Ellyn Satter, MS, RD, LCSW, provides parents with much-needed guidance in her book Your Child’s Weight: Helping without Harming. Like all her books, Satter focuses on the Division of Responsibility of feeding – adults are responsible for the when, what and where of feeding and children are responsible for the whether and how much of eating. She says that in order to help your child arrive at a weight that’s right for him or her, you need to focus on providing, not depriving. With many real life examples, she shows how depriving children backfires and can set them up for life-long weight struggles.

Satter discusses appropriate food selection, the importance of family dinners, physical activity and how parents can optimize feeding at each stage of growth – from birth through adolescence. No matter how many times I read her books, I am always amazed how simplistic and ingenious her feeding advice is. After working with overweight adults for years, I’ve witnessed firsthand how parental feeding strategies contribute to weight problems in adults.

But don’t expect the typical diet and healthy eating advice from this book. Instead, Satter gets to the heart of what causes children to balloon to weights nature did not intend for them.

This is a must read for anyone with a family history of excess weight or obesity.

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I overcame most of my food issues in my twenties. It happened during a 10-month internship in the city of New Orleans. I was obsessed with eating low-fat even though I still carried extra weight. I constantly complained about how fat seemed to be infused into every food imaginable until a friend called me on it: “Do you even enjoy eating, Maryann?” At that moment I decided to ditch my low-fat-only diet so I could enjoy the culturally-diverse food while I was there.

But this time was different. I didn’t take it as free license to eat like crazy. Instead, I continued to eat a balanced diet and exercise. I soon figured out there was no reason to over-eat because unlike before, I could always have some fatty food the next day. By the end of the 10-months, I actually lost some weight. How could this be? My desire to over-eat was almost nonexistent. It was one of the most liberating feelings of my life.

After I started working as a dietitian, I searched for books on this topic. Eventually I found a book called Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD and Elyse Resch, MS, RD. These two dietitian-authors write that we are all born with a natural ability to regulate food intake. Unfortunately, modern society teaches the opposite – we should clean our plate, restrict what we eat to lose weight and avoid eating “bad” foods even if we crave them. What I have learned since reading this book is that our children will pick up on our food issues unless we break free of them. This is especially true for mothers and daughters.

Intuitive Eating aims to get you back to the intuitive eater you were born to be – eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are comfortably full (and that means eating any food you want!). There are 10 strategies to guide you through the intuitive eating process. The first eight work to undue the damaging effects of culture’s “dieting mentality” and the last two discuss nutrition and exercise.

Being a good food role model for your kids is not about eating perfectly. In fact, I hope my children don’t become obsessed with eating only healthy foods. I want them to have a healthy relationship with food – one where eating nutritious foods isn’t a chore, where they naturally maintain a healthy weight and they are able to eat indulgent foods without feeling guilty or “bad”.

So I recommend this book to moms everywhere. It will not only make you a better role model, it will change your life.

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