There are many reasons to become vegetarian, including personal health, costs to the environment and the treatment of animals. Whatever your philosophical bent, this book provides the nuts-and-bolts information needed to maintain a healthy diet. As an athlete, I found it especially helpful to understand the function of fat and the different kinds of fats. Although this book helped ease my conversion into a lacto/ovo vegetarian a year ago, and I did enjoy the section on training non-vegeterians to understand the meatless choice, I would recommend the book highly to anyone, vegetarian or not, wanting to understand human nutritional needs. Food has an enormous social subtext and is surrounded by so much myth and fable it is hard to know what to believe. This book, in its sensible and attractive way, is completely credible.