I’m offering a special deal right now: To take advantage of it, purchase either Going Against the Grain or Gluten Free Throughout the Year, save your receipt and email or mail it to me, and you can get $25.00 off the price of any nutrition coaching program with me or $20.00 off my Get Started Combo nutrition counseling services. This offer is good for New Clients only and runs through November 7th this year. (I chose that date because it’s important to read about and really understand eating against the grain before the holidays begin!)

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My new book Gluten Free Throughout the Year received high marks in two new book reviews by correspondents who regularly write about gluten-free living and gluten-free books. One appeared on About.com, a part of The New York Times Company, and the other appeared on Examiner.com.

Here are excerpts from the About.com review by Teri Gruss:

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by Melissa Diane Smith

(Opinion) When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776 covering our rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, I’m sure they could not foresee that the food that sustains us and is essential for those rights would be changed so drastically between then and now by greedy corporations focused on profit. I doubt they could have ever conceived of the idea that the real food they ate for nourishment would be manipulated in such horrendous, harmful, underhanded ways without the people’s knowledge that it puts our very right to Life, Health and the pursuit of Happiness at risk. Back then who could have ever imagined packaged fake foods made with refined flour, sugar and long lists of chemical ingredients that no one can pronounce, meat from animals pumped up with drugs and unnaturally raised on outrageous amounts of toxic corn, and corn and soy sprayed with harmful chemicals and genetically tampered with to withstand those toxic chemicals when everything else sprayed with the chemicals dies?

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To coincide with the release of my new book Gluten Free Throughout the Year, I am hitting the book tour trail, spreading the word in a number of different ways.

It all starts Wednesday, May 12th, at www.Celiac.com with my first author interview about the book. I am very pleased to have a leading site in the gluten-free movement and industry, www.Celiac.com as the first “stop” on my Virtual Book Tour. (In case you were wondering, a Virtual Book Tour is a tour in which an author visits websites and blogs instead of traveling across the country to bookstores.) Be sure to “travel” along with me by going to this link, so you can read the interview and learn a lot more about the book, why I wrote it, and how the format of the book came to be.

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I am very pleased to announce the release of my new book, Gluten Free Throughout the Year: A Two-Year, Month-to-Month Guide for Healthy Eating. I wrote the book as a companion guide to Going Against the Grain for the many people who asked for it. The primary focus is to help people on a gluten-free diet, but it’s also useful for people who want to lose weight or who follow a reduced-carbohydrate diet. Below is a summary of the information in the book followed by quick answers to several questions I am asked most often about the book by my clients and readers.

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Eating gluten free at picnics, while traveling, when you’re sick, and during holidays. All this and more is covered in the first ever gluten-free book of its kind, Gluten Free Throughout the Year. The book has:

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by Melissa Diane Smith

If you think eating gluten free is only therapeutic for people who have health problems and experience uncomfortable symptoms, get ready for a surprise: It just might be a little-used nutritional strategy for giving athletes a winning edge. The cover story in the March issue of Men’s Journal, “Winning Without Wheat,” described how members of a pro cycling team switched to a diet free of gluten (found in wheat, rye and barley) and were pleasantly surprised with the results. They experienced better digestion, improved sleep, speedier recovery, and substantially improved athletic performance.

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The podcast interview that Jimmy Moore of The Livin’ La Vida Low Carb Show did with me is now available! Jimmy is doing a great job spreading the word about the health benefits of low-carb diets, I love his enthusiastic personality, and I really enjoyed being on his show. He and I had a wonderful chat and we covered a lot of territory about the many unadvertised troubles with grains. If you have not yet read my Going Against the Grain book (or if you just need a little refresher on the information), the interview is a good overview of many of the topics I cover in that book. The interview runs less than an hour, and the many subjects we discussed in that time include:

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The Southern Arizona Celiac Support (SACS) Gluten-Free Food Faire this Saturday, April 24, is going to be bigger and better than ever, and I will be there signing copies of my Going Against the Grain book and handing out flyers about my soon-to-be-released book, Gluten Free Throughout the Year: A Two-Year, Month-to-Month Guide for Healthy Eating. If you still haven’t gotten a personally autographed copy of Going Against the Grain or if you’d like to be one of the first to see the cover of my new book, be sure to stop by my booth. Also at the faire will be lots of gluten-free foods to sample, raffles for gluten-free food items and donated goods, and a silent auction. SACS will be selling two very helpful items, maps indicating GF restaurants in the Tucson area and restaurant cards that help make ordering in restaurants an easier process.

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I’m happy to announce that my new book, Gluten Free Throughout the Year, will be available in May if not before. (That’s a big reason why Nutrition News & Notes has been so quiet for a while!)

To be one of the first people to get a copy, keep checking back on this blog, especially toward the end of April and beginning of May. I’ll let you know exactly when the book becomes available, a lot more about its content, and how you can order it, and I’ll list some other sites that I plan to “visit” to spread the word, too. So, stay tuned. (I’ll also be sending an announcement to those of you on my mailing list. But that won’t be sent out quite as early as my blog post will be posted.)

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by Melissa Diane Smith

(Opinion) We desperately need a food revolution and there are indications that one may have already started.

First lady Michelle Obama is spreading the word around the country about making better food choices in her anti-obesity campaign and she just planted her second organic White House vegetable garden.

Last week ABC News reported that a coalition of Chicago high school students went to a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education to speak out against their school lunch menu. The students are fighting against the nutrient-poor, frozen and highly processed foods they are being served in the school cafeteria. Some students were quoted as saying, “Nutrients are missing. Calories are high. Sugar is high,” and, “Parents rely on schools to give their children nutritious meals, not tan-colored slop.” In addition, they said they rarely see any vegetables being served.

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