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Pennington Biomedical Research Center 6400 Perkins Road Baton Rouge, LA 70809 E-mail: larsonde{at}pbrc.edu
Vegetarian Nutrition is a comprehensive text containing 20 chapters that focus on the nutritional and nonnutritional aspects of vegetarian diets. The book contains a scholarly review of research in the area of vegetarian nutrition, which in the past 30 y has progressively shifted from the investigation of dietary concerns to the investigation of benefits and preventative approaches. The collection is particularly timely given that more and more Americans are interested in and claim to be following vegetarian diets.
Vegetarian Nutrition is well organized into 5 sections that concentrate on various aspects of plant-based diets and vegetarianism. Section I contains 2 chapters describing vegetarian diets, current trends in vegetarianism, and the public health risk-to-benefit ratio of vegetarian and meat-based diets. Section II contains 5 chapters that collectively focus on the role of vegetarian diets in the prevention of chronic diseases, including coronary heart disease, cancer, obesity, osteoporosis, diabetes, and neurologic disease. Section II also contains a chapter addressing vegetarian diets and longevity. Section III addresses the adequacy of vegetarian diets through the life cycle and in special groups. The 5 chapters in this section review health benefits and nutritional concerns specific to children and adolescents, women during pregnancy and lactation, women in their reproductive years, elderly individuals, and athletes. The 4 chapters in section IV discuss recommendations for healthy vegetarian diets and review the possible nutrients of concern in vegetarian diets, the health-promoting aspects of phytochemicals, the guidelines for chronic disease prevention, and the development of a vegetarian food guide. Finally, section V addresses the global issues and nonnutritional perspectives of vegetarian diets and includes sections on the environmental effects of meat production and vegetarianism and the moral, historical, religious, and spiritual aspects of vegetarian diets.
The editor of Vegetarian Nutrition is to be commended for compiling such a comprehensive collection that both reviews our current scientific knowledge of vegetarian diets and their positive effects on human health and emphasizes that this knowledge is far from complete. The chapters are authored by scientists, professors, or clinicians who are knowledgeable in vegetarian issues and well qualified to cover their assigned chapter areas. Each chapter is well written in an unbiased fashion, heavily referenced, and appropriately positioned to contribute to the excellent flow of the book. My only criticism of some of the chapters, particularly the introductory chapter, is that they attempt to define vegetarianism too concretely (eg, ovolactovegetarian, strict vegetarian, etc) rather than to use a continuum, which is more typical of how plant diets are consumed (ie, most individual eating patterns do not fall nicely into an easily defined box). Although many of the chapters in section IV, "Recommendations for Healthy Vegetarians," contain useful charts on the approximate nutrient or phytochemical content of selected vegetarian foods, the book as a whole lacks practical information that may be of interest to some audiences. Sample menus appropriate for children, adults, or athletes following vegetarian diets or ideas on how to transition toward a plant-based diet would have been a nice addition to the book.
Overall, I found Vegetarian Nutrition to be a worthwhile text that would be useful to researchers, students, and health professionals. The book provides an excellent, unbiased review of the current scientific knowledge concerning vegetarian diets. Collectively, the authors make a compelling argument for plant-based diets on the basis of both health and global issues. The only thing lacking from some chapters is practical information.