Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family - 2nd Edition by Ellyn Satter (Paperback)

About the Book

Ellyn Satter's "Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family" takes a leadership role in the grassroots movement back to the family table. More a cooking primer than a cookbook, this book encourages singles, couples, and families with children to go to the trouble of feeding themselves well. Satter uses simple, delicious recipes as a scaffolding on which to hang cooking lessons, fast tips, night-before suggestions, in-depth background information, ways to involve kids in the kitchen, and guidelines on adapting menus for young children. In chapters about eating, feeding, choosing food, cooking, planning, and shopping, the author entertainingly helps readers have fun with food while not eating unhealthily or too often. She cites current studies and makes a convincing case for lightening up on fat and sodium without endangering ourselves or our children. The book demonstrates Satter's dictum that "your positive feelings about food and eating will do more for your health than adhering to a set of rules about what to eat and what not to eat."

Book Synopsis

This readable, entertaining, and light-hearted book by Ellyn Satter, based on solid scientific evidence, will transform your life. In writing about eating, feeding, and cooking, Satter also writes about emotional health and positive family relationships. Satter encourages you to celebrate eating. Eating is okay. Eating enough is okay. Enjoying eating is okay. Eating what you like--and discovering the joy of cooking--is okay. Raising your child to do the same thing is more than okay, it is brilliant! How can this be? Won't taking off the brakes on eating and weight make you eat way too much and gain a lot of weight? Based on her research and experience with Eating Competence and the Satter Division of Responsibility in Feeding, Satter says no. On the contrary, discovering the joy of eating--becoming eating competent--lets you connect with your inner self that knows how to eat.

From the Back Cover

Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family Encourages you to have meals that are richly rewarding to plan, prepare, and at--and shows you how. Provides entertaining and practical and cooking and food lessons for the novice as well as the seasoned cook. gives guidelines for raising good eaters, adapting menus for your children and involving kids in the kitchen. Reviewer comments Its wonderful when she says, "love good food, trust yourself, and share that love and trust with your children." Encouraging people to eat well is far better than laying out all the rules. Though I have read cookbooks all my life, I've never before believed I could eat anything in them. Secrets lets me see what a normal menu really is and made food safe for eating. I can't tell you how often I refer to Secrets as my favorite all-around nutrition information book.

About the Author

Readers say that Ellyn Satter's books transformed their lives: Satter writes not only about food, eating, and feeding, but about emotional health and positive family relationships. Satter gives her blessings to all food, and to you for eating it, by sharing her conviction that you and your family are more important than your diet. Satter's research confirms that being positive and self-trusting with respect to food and eating does more for your nutritional, medical, and emotional health than adhering to a set of rules about what to eat and not to eat. Will letting yourself be positive and joyful with eating make you fat? Despite your worst fears, it will not. People who are competent with eating--who approach food and eating with optimism, self-trust, and curiosity--weigh less than those who guide their eating with negativity, self-denial, and avoidance.