In THE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN DIET, author. Kelly Wright. details Franklin's lifetime and diet principles. Recipes for his favourite foods are followed by sample meal plans and the Appendix contains seventy-five recipes from Thomas Tryon's 1691 book, reputed to be the first vegetarian cookbook ever written. In her genuinely groundbreaking new book on Ben Franklin's superb habits for health and longevity, author, Kelly Wright, points out there's a lot about Franklin you probably don't know, starting with the fact that people's firmly implanted image of him as obese is not at all representative. The more accurate portrait of Franklin on the front cover of this book was painted when the remarkably gifted father of his country-a publisher, statesman, diplomat, scientist, inventor and all-round original creative thinker, a true Renaissance man-was forty-five-years-old and had a tall, lean, muscular physique, the same body he had for most of his life, right into his seventies. Mens sana in corpore sano - a healthy mind in a healthy body-precisely expresses Franklin's core values regarding his person. He firmly believed in and practised, regular exercise-leaping was one of his favourite workouts-and he was rigorously abstemious when it came to food and alcohol. Franklin's long health life was most probably a result of how he chose to live and a case can even be made that, besides his genes and natural brilliance, Benjamin Franklin was able to do so many things so well because of his exceptional style of living. It didn't weight him down and, unlike many in his century; he wasn't walking around in a stupor from excessively heavy meats and fats, not to mention intemperate alcohol consumption. His eating and exercising habits were light-years ahead of his time and when he passed away at eighty-four; his lifespan was almost twice that of his contemporaries. Imagine the ripple effect if Franklin hadn't followed a sober diet and had been a drunk or died of disease at age forty-two like the average man of that time. References, a list of Resources, and an Index complete this cutting-edge book that, beyond diet, presents Franklin's precepts, sage advice and special viewpoint on living.