Which is not as hard as it may seem. "Raw food is everywhere," says Alt. "You can do 75 percent of your diet without a struggle. Start with carpaccio, tartare, sashimi. Seared foods. Almost all the dairy you eat has a raw cousin." Indeed, right in front of us in the sunny Peruvian sushi restaurant in Greenwich Village where we're eating, Alt has summoned a banquet of skewered cod, tuna ceviche and salmon sashimi—as light and flavor­ful a lunch as you could imagine. 

Alt is an impressive companion, starting with the stunning looks, her command of the menu and her fluency with nutritional science, all topped off with an amaz­ing biography that has names like Bob Fosse, Howard Stern and Donald Trump studding her stories. But Alt, raised on Long Island, the daughter of a South Bronx fire chief and a housewife who herself was once a showroom model, seems rather matter-of-fact about her accomplishments. "I never believed I was beautiful," she says and then laughs. "I remember working in Florida with Renee Simonsen, who was going out with the guy from Duran Duran who is now mar­ried to the girl from Juicy Couture. We were walking in a mall, and her with her blonde hair and oversize features and the way she walked—people literally stopped dead to look at her. I was like the redheaded stepchild."