Synergy. In food terms, it's when two nutrients that, individually, are pretty good for you hook up and do something even better for you as a team.

Eating tomatoes with broccoli, for example, might help fight prostate cancer. Eat soy foods and drink green tea in the same meals and you might be less likely to get cancer in the first place.

Writer and dietitian Elaine Magee, whose work with www.WebMD.com puts her in contact with a lot of original medical research, began to notice a couple of years back how many research projects were uncovering ways that nutrients in food can work together to prevent illness or slow its progress.

"The term synergy started popping up everywhere," she said in a phone interview from her Pleasant Hill, Calif., home. Magee, who writes the Recipe Doctor column that appears weekly in The Advertiser, decided there was a book in this emerging concept, even if it was too early to be sure exactly how all this information would play out. Rodale, the respected publisher of health-focused books, agreed. "Food Synergy" (paperback) is reaching stores now.

"This is the first book for the general public about this subject," Magee said. She has been asked if she isn't "jumping the gun" — much of this research is very new and not conclusive. Her answer: Detailed and daunting as the actual research results can be to read, the conclusions to be drawn from the work amount to what any health expert would tell you to do.

Flip to Chapter 7 in Magee's book: Choose whole foods and whole grains over highly refined foods. Eat fruits and vegetables in their least processed form (but if the best you can do is frozen spinach, choose that over no veggies at all). Treat yourself to a handful of nuts each day. And so on.

"There is magic in the packaging of the food," Magee said. What she means is, the research indicates that we're supposed to eat food as close as possible to the form in which it grows. Take apples, she said: "A lot of the phytonutrients, the antioxidant phenolics and flavenoids, are in the peel and there's some evidence that the apple peel has some synergy with the nutrients in the apple flesh." (A research project at Cornell University indicates that eating the peel and the flesh together may prevent oxidation of free radicals — unstable molecules that damage cells and are believed to contribute to many diseases.)

So now, on top of everything else we have to know, do we have to memorize a list of foods that work with other foods?

You can if you want — the specific information is in the book. But Magee, the practical mom of two teenagers, doesn't expect that.

"I'm in the real world," she said. "I've got kids. I've got a job. I know weeknights and the crunch to get dinner on the table. I try to keep things as fast and simple as possible and I cut corners wherever I can."

The other night, dinner for her family was whole-wheat Boboli (a pizza bread) with a topping of a bit of commercial barbecue sauce, grated part-skim mozzarella and pre-cooked chicken strips and green onions. The only "cooking" she did was to cut the green onions, bake the pizza and throw together a big salad. It wasn't, perhaps, the most "Food Synergy"-oriented meal, but it involved whole grains, lower-fat protein and fresh vegetables.

"I call it halfway homemade. We're not cooking, we're composing. And that's fine," she said.

One thing that Magee is particularly excited about is what emerged when she toted up the calories and nutritional content in a theoretical daily diet of the combined "superfoods" identified by the research. "It adds up to 1,300 measly calories. If you eat the way this research suggests, you end up having the perfect omega-3 (fatty acids) ratio, the perfect omega-6, the ideal fiber count."

Looking at those figures, "even my head was swimming," she said.

Magee included information on using food to fight four deadly and common health conditions (heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes), examples of synergy-driven menus and, of course, recipes.

But, she says, "What the book does is not make you obsessed but provides you with information you can use to go out and enjoy your life."

Some foods offer more health benefits when combined than they do when served separately

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.