Can food prevent cancer? Can changing your diet eliminate diabetes? Joy Bauer from NBC’s Today Show answers with an encouraging ‘yes!’ in her new edition of Food Cures. She sets out detailed meal plans along with in depth nutrition information giving you a road map for many common health problems – diabetes, insomnia, migraines, weight loss and more. Her upbeat ‘can do’ tone will get you excited about improving your diet. The detailed meal plans will give you an easy list to follow each day.

I have personally been through more healthy nutrition programs than I can count so when the review copy of Food Cures arrived in the mail I was, well, skeptical. Maybe even hostile. We all see so many outrageous nutrition claims on the web and phony diet supplements sold that simply fail to deliver results. Would this book be the same? I dug in to find out.

Joy’s “cures” are really risk reductions and prevention plans that can slow the progress of a disease or reduce your risk of onset. She is very clear about this from the first page and her honesty is refreshing. She also takes a tough look at supplements such as fish oil and vitamins – pointing out the fake fads and giving you solid science to pick the few supplements that might actually help you. Her meal plans are top notch and include a ‘transition diet’ for weight loss which moves you easily into the low carb world. Her recipes are quick to prepare and produce fresh, lively dishes. Score four points for Joy on honesty, good science, well thought out plans and creative cooking.

I did notice that Food Cures should be most appealing to woman. It contains large sections on beauty, hair and skin health, osteoporosis and premenstrual syndrome. Oddly, I was also unable to find anything on allergies. It’s not even listed in the index. How could we miss this in today’s allergy crazed, peanuts-might-kill-me world?

Overall I was glad to add Food Cures to my cookbook shelf. It fills in the science behind healthy nutrition and gives me great meal plans . We have started eating more salads at my house in the hopes of avoiding cancer. We eat them more slowly too. Why? Because Food Cures says that people who eat slow tend to eat 67 calories less per meal. That adds up to 14 pounds of weight loss per year. Pass the broccoli please.