Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have enjoyed cooking for decades and was recently diagnosed with premature heart disease. I was not coming from a position of ignorance and had moderated my diet for weight loss, so that it was largely healthy already: whole grains, brown rice, restricted fruit, encouraged fresh vegetables, no added sugar and salt, moderate amounts of lean protein and so on. I missed the variety of the recipes that I'd previously used, however, and didn't want to get stuck in a rut that would threaten my ability to sustain this new approach. That's when I bought this book, hoping for varied healthy recipe ideas. I was not impressed with this book's assumption that use of canned and processed ingredients is healthier than natural, fresh ones, just because they contain less fat. There are many more elements to a healthy heart than simply fat and cholesterol levels and a book of recipes that thinks a can of soup is a great idea as a binding agent is simply not as healthy as it could be. Canned and processed goods are sodium rich and crammed with preservatives that we just don't need. Meanwhile, 'Low fat dairy' is the single biggest dietary con in recent years: any product claiming to be low-fat has invariably boosted the taste level by adding sugar. Just because you lower the fat, does not make it good for the heart. Upon reading the nutritional content listed for a single serving of some of the recipes, I was dismayed to see that while they do indeed have a low fat content, they are AWASH with sugar. One chicken recipe listed a staggering 32g of sugar per serving. This is utter ridiculousness. Anybody who wants to keep or promote a healthy heart or who wishes to limit the effects of existing disease is simply not going to achieve that with a book that apparently doesn't understand that fat is not the only evil. It is well known that a diet high in sugar also has negative consequences for the development of heart disease. Curried pumpkin soup? Sounds delicious! WHY put maple syrup in it? No sugar is necessary, not in ANY form, in order for this dish to be tasty. What on earth are you even trying to accomplish when you put the name of the American Heart Association on the cover and sell it as a healthy cookbook, when it manifestly isn't? When I purchase a book for heart healthy recipes that is linked to this organisation, I do not expect to have to go through all of them with a fine-toothed comb in order to find the 1 in 10 recipes that are genuinely healthy or that do not require significant alteration before they are of any use to me at all. Deeply disappointed.