February 19, 2009 Award-Winning Writer Sally Squires To Discuss Great-Tasting, Healthy Food on a Budget

Award-winning medical and health writer Sally Squires has acquired strategies through the years for eating healthfully while staying on budget and making weight-loss results stick. Squires, a former Washington Post reporter, will present "Healthy Bites: Great-Tasting, Healthy Food on a Budget" at the Library of Congress at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, March 11, in the Mary Pickford Theater on the third floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the Library's Science, Technology and Business Division, the lecture is free and open to the public; tickets or reservations are not needed. Books on nutrition and healthy eating from the Library's collections will also be displayed in the foyer of the theater. Squires recently retired from a two-decade career at the Washington Post. She is now director of Health and Wellness at the Washington, D.C., public affairs firm Powell Tate. While at the Post, she created the nationally syndicated column "The Lean Plate Club." In 2006, she parlayed the popular column into the best-selling book "Secrets of the Lean Plate Club," which will be available for purchase at the lecture. A book signing will follow the talk. In the introduction to her book, Squires notes that "despite our best public efforts, a multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry, the sale of millions of diet books &hellip and the high-profile weight struggles of Oprah, Sara Ferguson and Al Roker, the nation isn't getting thinner. It's getting fatter." The book promises to help readers "savor the joy of eating well," "avoid nutritional mischief and exercise boredom" and "make any diet work better for you." When writing for the Washington Post, Squires used the Library's collections to add an extra dimension to her columns, including items such as an occasional picture from the Prints and Photographs Division or a receipt from a 19th-century household manual, found in the Library's extensive collections on domestic technology. The Library of Congress maintains one of the largest and most diverse collections of scientific and technical information in the world. The Science, Technology and Business Division provides reference and bibliographic services and develops the general collections of the Library in all areas of science, technology, business and economics, with the exception of clinical medicine and technical agriculture, which are the subject specialties of the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library. For more information, visit www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/.