Paula Deen, Julia Child books on unhealthy list

WASHINGTON-If you're looking to eat healthy in 2010, which cookbooks should you avoid? Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, for one, and Bobby Flay's Grilling for Life, for another, says the Washington-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which advocates a healthy diet for disease prevention.

A new PCRM report finds that many cookbooks released or revived in the last decade encourage readers to consume more fattening meat-heavy meals at a time when record obesity rates mean that Americans have never needed more encouragement to eat nutritious low-fat foods. Paula Deen's recipe for Baked Wild Rice in her cookbook Kitchen Classics, for instance, sounds healthy but incorporates one cup of heavy cream and one cup of butter.

“These high-fat recipes help explain why America's obesity-related medical spending doubled over the past decade,” said PCRM nutrition director Susan Levin, M.S., R.D. “You'd need a magnifying glass to find a vegetable in some of these cookbooks. But the good news is that a growing number of chefs are offering tasty meatless recipes that can help us stay trim and healthy.”

Among the bright spots were cookbooks like Alicia Silverstone's recently released The Kind Diet and Christina Pirello's Cooking The Whole Foods Way, which can help Americans improve their diets to fight obesity and other chronic diseases.

Here are the decade's best and worst cookbooks:

Five Worst Cookbooks

• Paula Deen's Kitchen Classics, by Paula Deen
• Mastering the Art of French Cooking, 13th edition, by Julia Child
• Grilling for Life, by Bobby Flay
• Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book: Celebrating the Promise
• Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore, by Jennifer McLagan

Five Best Cookbooks

• The Kind Diet, by Alicia Silverstone
• Skinny Bitch in the Kitch: Kick-Ass Recipes for Hungry Girls Who Want to Stop Cooking Crap (and Start Looking Hot!), by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin
• The Conscious Cook, by Tal Ronnen
• The Engine 2 Diet, by Rip Esselstyn
• Cooking the Whole Foods Way, by Christina Pirello