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which every one of the hundreds of low-fat cookbooks that clog the market boasts. The difference is in the fanaticism of the Ornish diet: you must avoid meats of all kinds (including fish), all oils (saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated—it doesn’t matter to Ornish), avocados, olives, nuts and seeds, even low-fat dairy, alcohol, and all other products with more than two grams of fat per serving. “No matter what you may have heard,” he writes, “olive oil is not good for you.” I remember attending a nutrition conference with Ornish in Boston a few years ago. An expert panel was struggling with the serious and difficult question of whether olive oil really confers benefits that other vegetable oils do not. As though he had been unwilling or unable to absorb the complexities of the argument, Ornish could contribute nothing more than to sputter that olive oil must be harmful because it is a fat. He seems to be fixated and obsessed.

Dean Ornish’s apparent unfamiliarity with the medical literature has not diminished his influence. One casualty is Sarah Schlesinger and her 500 Fat-Free Recipes (Villard Books), a solid seller last year. Referring to Ornish and more vaguely to studies from “societies around the world,” Schlesinger has become irrationally convinced that cancer and heart disease (plus acne, rashes, vertigo, and “hormonal imbalances”) automatically spring from consuming “excess” fat, which she takes to mean any fat at all. She offers us this urgent advice so that we can follow her diet even on trips abroad:

Learn the necessary phrases to express your needs. For instance, you can say “All my food must be fat-free” around the world in one of the following languages:

Spanish: Es necessario que mi comida no tenga grasa.

German: Mein Essen darf kein Fett enthalten.

French: Tout doit être préparé sans gras.

Italian: Niente douvebbe essere fritto.

Ms. Schlesinger surely deserves a refund for her Italian lessons.

If, contrary to Ornish and his polyglot epigones, there is not much to be gained from cooking the low-fat way, the corresponding pain had better be extremely minor. Absence of pain is the chief criterion I used while cooking for a month from a half-dozen low-fat cookbooks. I chose Butter Busters because of its popularity. But the pain one suffers from using—even just reading—this book was so excruciating that no gain, perhaps not even immortality, would make it worth cooking from. Two of the six merited serious analysis and experimentation. Martha Rose Shulman’s Provençal Light (Bantam) struck me as one of the most attractive and authentic low-fat cookbooks available. And Alice Medrich’s Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts (Warner Books) is the most methodical approach to the subject of low-fat cooking, for reasons I’ll explain.

What do these authors mean by low-fat cooking? The American Heart Association and the 1988 surgeon general’s report both call for us to take no more than 30 percent of our calories from fat. So this seems a good cutoff. Most low-fat cookbooks aim for it.

As the average American takes in about 37 percent of his or her calories from fat, cutting down to 30 percent does not seem like a drastic step—certainly not enough to have spawned an entire new industry. Seven percent of a 2,500-calorie day works out to 175 fat calories, less than two tablespoons of olive oil or butter. Why does the world need a flood of painfully self-righteous and badly written cookbooks to teach us how to avoid two tablespoons of butter a day? One reason is that nearly all low-fat cookbooks want every dish—every appetizer, every main course, every salad, every dessert, every bite that you put into your mouth—to contain fewer than 30 percent fat calories. This is, of course, unnecessary. The objective of a low-fat diet should be to average out your consumption to 30 percent, or whatever your fat goal is, not to force every single dish into the same low-fat straitjacket. But that is what most low-fat cookbooks do, taking a very modest goal and making it extremely difficult and