Don't Eat Your Heart Out

In a recent remodeling of Yankee Stadium, some 9,000 seats were yanked: the reason being that the American posterior has expanded by three inches since 1922. In this excellent guide to heart healthy eating, author/host Joe Piscatella points out that as a nation, we are--brace yourselves--1.5 billion pounds overweight. That's a lot of Twinkies, and the toll on our health is considerable; between 600,000 and 800,000 people will die of heart disease this year (half of them will be women, despite the popular myth that coronary heart disease is a male problem). In this entertaining, informative and inspirational seminar presented before a studio audience, Piscatella lays out the numbers and then offers viewers a simple way to reduce their fat budget without poring over every figure listed on the new nutrition labels (Piscatella quips that there is more reading going on in grocery stores than in libraries these days). With easy-to-use formulas for calculating ideal weight, calories, and allowable fat grams, viewers can simply deduce their fat budget (a fill-in-the-blank form is included with the video but is neither necessary nor referred to on the tape). And Piscatella doesn't follow the Dr. Attila the Hun No-Sugar-No-Fat-No-Fun Diet. If you want three Oreos, work those babies into your daily budget and enjoy (just leave the Big Mac out). One last factoid of interest to salad fans: there is more fat in 1 tablespoonful of salad dressing than in the same amount of hot fudge. What do you think? The Garden-Hershey Salad. Is there an untapped market here? A wonderful program (the recipe for reduced fat pesto is worth the price of the tape alone), Don't Eat Your Heart Out is highly recommended. Editor's Choice. (R. Pitman)