Blending Science with Spices: Tasty Recipes & Nutrition Tips for Healthy Living

Citation

Patel, G. (2012), "Blending Science with Spices: Tasty Recipes & Nutrition Tips for Healthy Living", Nutrition & Food Science, Vol. 42 No. 1, pp. 59-60. https://doi.org/10.1108/nfs.2012.42.1.59.2

All too often people turn to salt and ready‐made sauces and mixes to flavour foods but in Blending Science with Spices: Tasty Recipes & Nutrition Tips for Healthy Living the author takes you on a culinary journey through Western India, providing an array of nutritious, gluten‐free and light Gujarati‐style dishes.

The recipes include lots of vegetables, which are inexpensive and the recipes are simple and straightforward. There is also a nutritional analysis of each recipe and most are gluten free and suitable for vegetarians.

There is a lovely explanation of the role of free radicals, antioxidants, and how phytonutrients/phytochemicals mop these up and the health benefits of eating foods with a higher content of antioxidants. This includes benefits to those with chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, arthritis, and cancer.

There is a useful section on how to stock the kitchen store cupboards with different spices, herbs pulses and grains. While the recipes are made with American measures of cups they are easily converted to British quantities.

About the Reviewer

Gita Patel is a registered dietitian, certified diabetes educator, and certified Lifestyle Eating and Performance (LEAP) therapist specializing in diabetes, women's health, heart disease, vegetarian nutrition, healthy aging, migraines, IBS, IBD, Celiac disease, gastrointestinal problems with food allergies, food sensitivities and food intolerances, and multiple sclerosis. Her new vegetarian cookbook, Blending Science with Spices: Tasty Recipes & Nutrition Tips for Healthy Living, is the culmination of her traditional Indian background, the varied foods she grew up eating, and her extensive training in modern nutritional science. Gita Patel was raised in a traditional vegetarian family in India, and her first experience with food involved health and medicine. She credits her mother, Dayalaxmi, with kindling her passion to understand how food affects the body. Though initially Gita questioned her mother's faith in food as medicine, she later found herself studying the effects of foods on the body. “Ironically,” Gita says, “My studies led me to share my mother's faith in the Ayurvedic principles that see medicine and diet as complementary and inclusive and that recognize the powerful effect food has on physical health, mental clarity, and spiritual progress.” Thanks to her mother's influence, Gita turned her clinical focus to nutrition. Her resulting life's work has become helping individuals incorporate the health benefits of a vegetarian lifestyle. She notes, “With current research connecting the effect of what we eat on how we feel, food preparation is the one place where I can reflect daily on that fundamental”.