Dinner Music

This comes as life-giving fresh air to the stuffy, stale environment of do-don't diet books. Dr. Richard Donze, a Board-Certified Preventive Medicine physician, has lectured to and counseled thousands of people about diet and health the past eighteen years and seen the perennial frustration so many experience. He now tells How to Compose the Permanently Perfect Diet by replacing the usual failed calorie-milligram-right way/wrong way instructions with creative food stories and images. In one section he compares the dinner plate to a jungle where huge leaves obscure animals, the way mounds of green vegetables should cover smaller portions of meat. In the title chapter whole grains are like solo pianos, almost a complete orchestra in themselves, but sugar is like a cymbal, a useful accent that shouldn't drown out the other instruments. While most diet books are like the Ten Commandments - rigid, authoritarian, carved in stone, and easily disobeyed, Dinner Music is more like Aesop's Fables - playful, imaginative, and more enduring. Dr. Donze directs his tunes to the artistic right brain, which can inspire better eating faster and more efficiently than the plodding, facts-and-figures left side. Dinner Music eventually leads to a place Dr. Donze calls the "diet home," where simple foods simultaneously provide deep satisfaction, connection to family and planet, and abundant good health.