Take Five by Rose Elliot

Rose Elliot's latest offering, Take Five, is a drive to make us healthier and ensure that we all consume the essential five helpings of fruit and vegetables daily. Take Five is a small book and keenly priced at just £5. The colourful pages (no photographs) are full of good ideas and easy recipes.

What should we really be eating?

It is all very well that the World Health Organisation sends forth these edicts about what we should be eating but five helpings of fruit and vegetables, what does that really mean? Five buckets of carrots? Rose has very sensibly set down, in her eyes, what she believes to be a standard portion. An apple or pear would count as one fifth of the way to the ideal optimum; a shallow bowl of salad would count as another. The recommended daily intake of 15oz of vegetable matter should ideally be doubled anyway. But the facts are there for all to see. Adopting this eating method can improve your chances in fighting illness and improving your immune system.

Smoothies galore

Try her selection of smoothies and delicious vegetable juices, worth investing in a juicer for. Watermelon ginger is a delicious drink of watermelon (seeds removed first) with some puréed ginger, whizzed together in a food processor with some ice cubes. She includes some interesting salad combinations too. Crunchy beet salad is a mixture of beetroot, watercress, walnuts and goat's cheese.

Detox diet

Rose has included the statutory detox diet: everybody is doing them nowadays. Although she does say that providing you are eating sensibly, there is no need to purge yourself with one of these. But the idea of battening down the hatches for three days and vegging out is very appealing, if only one had the time.

Take Five is one of those great little books. To achieve greater inner harmony, £5 is a small price to pay for achieving that fighting machine that keeps illness away.

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*****

Publication Details:
144 pages.
Published by Cassell & Co.
ISBN 0304354236
2001

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