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AICR’s New American Plate Cookbook Rushed Into Second Printing
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New American Plate The New American Plate Cookbook includes over 200 recipes, each one crafted by a team of chefs, "foodies" and nutrition experts. (Note: These recipes are located on the AICR website and Dietary Exchangs are not included with the nutritional analyses). Mixed Greens with Blueberries and Feta Tricolored Peppers with Fresh Herbs Sweet Potato and Pear Stir-Fry with Chicken and Chile Sauce Layered Black Bean and Spinach Salad Whole Corn and Green Chile Muffins
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Scarcely one
month after it first appeared on bookstore shelves, runaway sales of TheNew
American Plate Cookbook: Recipes for a Healthy Weight and a Healthy Life
($24.95, University of California Press) by the American Institute for Cancer Research
(AICR) have prompted its publisher to order a second printing. The original print run of the book, which was published on March 1, was 20,000 copies. On March 25, the University of California Press ordered an additional printing of 20,000 books. “It looks like we’ve got a phenomenon on our hands,” said Stanley Holwitz, Executive Editor at the University of California Press. Holwitz suspects that sales of the cookbook are being driven by a public that is fed up with narrowly focused “quick fixes.” Holwitz believes Americans are ready for something more comprehensive – and more comprehendible – than the kind of “low-cal,” “low-fat,” or “low-carb” regimens that lead to bland, monotonous meals and yo-yo dieting. “New American Plate Cookbook is a gourmet cookbook that proposes a radically new way of thinking about what you eat, and people are responding to that,” Holwitz said. The book lays out an entirely new model for making meals – one that gently shifts the focus away from meat and onto vegetables, fruits, whole grains and other plant foods. The New American Plate approach employs international culinary techniques to add complex flavor, texture, color and aroma without adding fat and calories. Holwitz pointed to the book’s successes out of the gate: glowing reviews and feature articles in O, the Oprah Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Life, and many other magazines, as well as critical praise from food editors at the Associated Press, the Hartford Courant, the Denver Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Houston Chronicle, and others. Jeff Prince, AICR Vice President for Education, is a lead member of the team of chefs, food writers, nutritionists and scientists who authored the cookbook. He believes that the time is right for the book’s refreshing new approach. “By combining a love of richly flavored, luscious meals with a commitment to maximizing a recipe’s health benefits, New American Plate Cookbook seems to have hit a ‘sweet spot’ in the current American psyche,” he said. “Each one of the cookbook’s 200 recipes rebukes the notion that delicious food must be something less than healthy, and that healthy food must be something less than delicious.” Certainly, other cookbooks have made similar claims over the years. Prince insists, however, that the team behind New American Plate Cookbook was careful to avoid the classic missteps of ‘healthy’ cookbooks: Too often they cut back on fat, salt or sugar without regard for how such changes fundamentally alter a recipe’s overall appeal. “Our central goal was to ensure that each recipe was delicious and deeply satisfying,” he says. As a result, the cookbook team found ways to retain, and even intensify, a dish’s sensuous character while maximizing its health benefits. “We accomplished this by mixing in new combinations of vegetables and fruit and letting the abundance of plant food nudge aside things like saturated fat, added sugar and excess salt,” Prince continued. “Fortunately, vegetables and fruit naturally intensify flavor and add both texture and color to any dish.” In fact, New American Plate Cookbook reshapes the plate so that a variety of vegetables, whole grains, beans and other plant foods take up at least 2/3 of the space, leaving only 1/3 or less for animal protein. Not only does this layout switch the proportions found in a traditional American meal, it flatly contradicts the low-carb craze that has seized America over the past 5 years. And the authors couldn’t be happier about that. “As we were developing the cookbook, several independent factors were converging,” said Prince. “Low-carb eating was on the wane, because people looking to lose weight grew tired of its lack of variety and started raising concerns about how such high-fat diets would impact their health. “Meanwhile, clinical research was showing that meals rich in plant foods actually aid weight management, because their fiber and water content helps you feel fuller, sooner. And the Dietary Guidelines were coming out, urging Americans to increase their intake of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans.” New American Plate Cookbook arrived in bookstores at precisely the right moment to distill these disparate elements into a single, easy-to-use meal model, Prince said. “The timing couldn’t have been better for a simple and delicious way to eat that doesn’t involve counting calories, fat grams or servings of specific kinds of food. “Simply by adopting the New American Plate Cookbook approach, it’s possible to make sumptuous, flavorful meals that also happen to help you stay healthy, manage your weight, and reduce your risk of disease.” All royalties from sales of the New American Plate Cookbook go directly into an AICR fund for cancer research. AICR
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