Diet is an important factor in the cause and cure of many ills. The wrong foods can cause allergic reactions ranging from the well-known strawberry rash to death from allergic asphyxiation. The right foods can help you clear up such allergic reactions. The wrong foods can make you overweight, sap your energy and rob you of zest and well-being. And in the degenerative diseases of the heart and blood vessels, diet is the key; it is the difference between active good health and dangerous illness.

Not all doctors are agreed as to the exact role of the high-fat diet in the development of those circulatory disorders that account for more than one-half of the total deaths in this nation each year. It is diet that cocks the trigger of the deadly weapon now aimed at the hearts and brains of millions of Americans. Whether that trigger is ever pulled will depend, admittedly, on a number of other things: heredity, occurrence of other diseases in the victim, certain hormones, stresses, and biochemical factors, etc. But why play Russian roulette with your heart?

By eliminating certain foods from your diet, by including others in the right amounts, and by the use of nutritional supplements, you can achieve at least a 50 per cent protection against heart attack. Unfortunately, as simple as proper dieting is, doctors, fitness trainers and dietitians have found it to be one of the most difficult measures to prescribe for their patients and clients, and one of the most difficult to get them to follow consistently.

Proper diet is the easiest and safest thing that can be prescribed. But because eating habits are so firmly established with most people, and because dietary therapy takes time, many follow a stop-and-go routine (often referred to as yo-yo dieting) that offers little long-range benefit. A healthy diet does not mean starvation or tasteless foods.

Yes, a corrective diet does not mean either starvation or the grim necessity of eating bland, tasteless foods. Moreover, a little experimenting in the kitchen will soon produce meals that, from the standpoint of taste and aesthetic appeal, will be equal if not superior to, the high-fat dishes to which you are accustomed.

This is done by a little originality on your part plus a break with old cooking and eating habits that have grown into fixed, and often monotonous, dining patterns.

Your palate will be grateful for the change. And you will experience on the low-fat diet a startling increase in vigor and vitality, a new sense of well-being.