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My approach to eating, as shown in recent columns, revolves largely around the two basic food groups – cheap food and tasty food. Nutrition consultant Cynthia Harriman says all well and good, but what about "healthy" food?

VISIT the Good Food Info web site

Admittedly we all need to rethink our eating habits. The world has come a long way since Betty Crocker mandated the daily menu for millions of American families. We’re fatter than ever and thanks to lousy meal planning, we’re sicker than ever too. Experts say three-quarters of health problems in later years can be tied directly to poor nutrition. Yet fast and junk food commercials dominate the airwaves, pushing flour and sugar products, french fries, soda, chips and pizza as if they were the source of human happiness, rather than the problem itself. Need a bigger fix? Just supersize. Kids learn what to eat from their parents and use food to medicate their anxious often sedentary lives. When the problem gets too big, Americans resort to quick-fix crash diets and evasive surgical solutions.

Enter the food consultant. What families need, the consultant says, is a simple, practical plan for eating whole foods.

"It’s extremely confusing out there for most people," Harriman says. "Every time you turn around some one is saying the opposite of what you just heard. People have the idea that in order to eat a healthy diet. You have to eat stuff that tastes like cardboard."

Harriman’s approach has been to read and read and read. Then she methodically separated the wheat from the chaff, to get at what she calls "the core of immutable knowledge" about what food is really healthy. Rather than pursue a degree as a nutritionist, she has applied her years of experience as a writer, a marketer, a businessperson and a language expert to package and present her messages in a form that can be easily understood and practiced in the home. Her targets are largely women, especially women with new children and those in middle age suddenly concerned for their own health and future.

"People think, If they could just get fat out of their diet, it would be the ideal diet. Patently untrue," Harriman says. "It’s more about eating good fats and avoiding bad fats. It’s about eating whole grains as opposed to refined white flour."

To that end, Harriman brings healthy foods into the classroom where participants get a taste of their new lifestyle. They are universally surprised, she says, to discover how delicious, easy-to-prepare and affordable good food is.

Harriman is taking her message locally to the Internet. As a former computer guru Harriman built her own web site without fear. Her new site, Good Food Info, is a work-in-progress, a launch pad for her evolving education and consulting business. Right now readers get a starting list of books, culled from Harriman’s extensive and ongoing research into healthy eating. Readers can sign up for her short courses that teach the basics about nutrition, meal planning, shopping and cooking. As a consultant she takes students right into the supermarket and even into their own kitchens to examine how and what they eat.

"Nutrition is a hair shirt. Even the word is a real turn off," Harriman says. "My whole thrust is to not emphasize what you can’t eat and focus on what you can."

The web site is lean and mean, as unrefined as bulgar, just a few pages. It promises no instant fix, no revolutionary plan. The answer, Harriman says, is to begin the healthy lifestyle change now, slowly, by stripping away myths about food that are at the core of unhealthy habits.

"I see myself as the pipeline from the experts to the public," she says, "rather than being the expert. "It’s a renaissance time in the nutrition field and there’s lots of good information out there. My job is more teacher, guide and coach."

Harriman sometimes lapses into computer jargon, referring to her students and customers as "end-users" which may be an apt description. It is the food "user", the individual eater, who benefits long after the consultant is gone. How much is it worth to learn the right road to take on a highway of screaming inaccurate neon signs?

To build the site, Harriman hired her own consultant, Ronald Gehrman, profiled here a few weeks back. In four hours he had her up and running on Adobe Go Live. She built the pages and posted the site at Pair.com that charges under $10 a month.

"I thought it was really important to keep my overhead really low," she says. "This time I want to follow my career where it wants to go."

THE UP SHOT

Yes, I need this food info. I’m gaining weight, getting old and eating less well than I could. And I’ll do something about it soon – promise. But what really interests me here too is the backstory, the re-inventing of Cynthia Harriman. Two decades ago we were both writing newspaper columns. I forget what mine was about. Hers was about computers in the early 80s. Before that she was a teacher, a former French major who married five days out of college. She and her husband raised two children who are now themselves college grads. Harriman worked for H&R Block, did accounting for an antiques store, got in and out of the computer craze.

She is best known as a travel writer. Her book "Take Your Kids to Europe" is now in its fifth edition. Her freelance work has appeared from local publications to major computer magazines to the Washington Post. She appears to change parachutes as easily as shoes.

"This is the first time I’ve really made a process out of analyzing what interests me," Harriman says. "I decided when I turned 50 that I wanted to find something that did more good for the world."

Last year, after nursing her son through a serious accident, she sat down and identified four categories of work that truly deeply interested her -- conflict resolution, nutrition, literature and languages.

"I’d done the big business thing," says Harriman, whose last job designing computer accessories sent her shuttling back and forth between China, her home in Portsmouth and the company home office in Philadelphia with a salary hitting $120,000 year. But with the house mortgage and kids’ college expenses under control, she has set her sites on a more complex target – inner peace. She wants to leave the world a better place.

"I didn’t want my tombstone to read – She made a hell of a compact disk holder," Harrimans says. Teaching people to eat well and live longer she finds to be enormously rewarding work.

"I haven’t got it all figured out yet," Harriman says. "But I want to do something now that I can care passionately about … For me this is my community service. If I can help people change diets it has a ripple effect.."

The teacher, it appears, has as much to gain as the student and help – it appears -- is just a donut away.