Harriet Roth (MM'47) is considered a pioneer of the modern healthy cooking movement. A former director of the Pritikin Longevity Center Cooking School, she published in 1984, Deliciously Low: The Gourmet Guide to Low-Sodium, Low-Fat, Low-Cholesterol, Low-Sugar Cooking (Penguin Books/Plume). Since then, she has written other cooking guides that combine healthy gourmet recipes with the latest research on nutrition. Her books have sold more than 6.5 million copies, including Harriet Roth's Cholesterol Control Cookbook (Plume), which was updated, revised, and reissued last June and is endorsed by Mehmet Oz, coauthor of the best-selling You series of health books.
How did you first become involved with low-fat, low-cholesterol cooking?
I was teaching French and Italian cooking—this was 30 years ago. My husband developed a coronary condition, and when he went to the doctors, they told him that he needed bypass surgery. He was operated on, and I decided that since I had contributed so heavily with my delicious but unhealthy cooking that I had an obligation to change my style of food preparation. I was determined to bring him back to good health with delicious, healthy foods.
Your first book, published in 1984, was one of the first to use computers to do a nutritional analysis of ingredients.
When it came out then, people were amazed. ... So I really was a daughter of Carnegie Mellon!
How has nutrition awareness changed since you started publishing?
If you have McDonald's giving nutritional analysis for hamburgers, come on! ... Cafeterias in schools are wonderful, they really care. They stress vegetables; they don't sell soft drinks anymore in most schools. Awareness just didn't happen over night—it has been a long time coming.
Change has come, in no small part, thanks to you.
I didn't invent the wheel, but I was alert to how the world's diet needed to change.
—Rob Cullen (HS'02)
