Good Health Magazine : NUTRITION : LEAD US NOT INTO CHOLESTEROL, BUT DELIVER US FROM FAT : HEALTH-FOOD RESTAURANTS OFFER A VARIETY OF NUTRITIOUS DISHES AND GENERALLY DANGLE FEWER TEMPTATIONS BEFORE CUSTOMERS’ EYES. HERE’S A SAMPLING OF WHAT’S ON THE MENU AT SIX SUCH ESTABLISHMENTS.

It’s never been easier to eat healthfully in Los Angeles. Half the new restaurants in town seem to be Italian, so garlic, olive oil and fresh vegetables are always within easy reach, to say nothing of complex carbohydrates in simple sauces. The non-Italian restaurants are rushing to put pasta primavera on the menu, and even a coffee shop may surprise you with an ultra-low-fat option or two.

So, if you can get all this at mainstream restaurants, why bother with a health-food establishment? Two reasons: Health-food restaurants offer a greater variety of healthful dishes, and they generally dangle fewer temptations before customers’ eyes. Fortunately, the range and variety of health-food eating places has been increasing.

OREAN EXPRESS, for instance, is a vegetarian fast-food restaurant. Vegetarian places have always offered nut-burgers and the like, but in a lunch-counter environment; Orean Express is a flat-out Hollywood hamburger stand gone meatless and dairyless but remaining pretty fast.

The utilitarian fast-food style does coexist strangely with the traditional wild-eyed quality of vegetarianism. Scattered around the take-out counter are signs recommending raw-nut “cookies” with the usual forced enthusiasm.

There’s a choice of burgers: a regular (brown rice) burger, another made from the tofu-like substance tempeh and a gluten “chip” burger in barbecue sauce. The man in line before me recommended the bean-filled tamale ($2.75), and it wasn’t bad. Not memorable either (except for the odd greenish-brown tinge of the masa ), but it did have a warm, meat-like chili filling and a pleasant topping of soy cheese, which actually had the texture and some of the flavor of cheese.

I’d looked forward to one of the non-dairy soy cones, but Orean Express was out of them. Instead, I had a granola-rum shake ($1.75), a rum-flavored shake with a few bits of granola in it. It also wasn’t bad--at least, I’m sure it was better than the traditional leaden carob brownies that were the principal alternative. In short, the food here is no more exciting than you’d get at a traditional vegetarian restaurant, but it is faster.

Orean Express, 1320 N. Vine St., Hollywood; (213) 462-9945. Open 7 a.m-9 p.m. Monday-Friday, 7 a.m.- 8 p.m. Saturday, 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Sunday.

NATURALLY FAST is not a fast-food restaurant--the name seems meant to suggest fitness--but it has a remarkably wide vegetarian menu, prominently signaling dishes approved by the American Heart Assn. Adjoining a big health-food store, it’s much brighter and sleeker than the usual health-food restaurant.

It has “burgers” and “untuna” sandwiches and a number of dishes credibly adapted from Mexican and Italian recipes. Spaghetti ($2.95) comes in your basic marinara sauce with mushrooms and bell peppers, no more acidic than at most restaurants. It would be nice if they offered Parmesan cheese (OK, make it rennetless Parmesan) to sprinkle on top.

With some dishes you can order a sauce a la carte, such as jambalaya sauce ($1.40). This turns out to be not exactly from Louisiana but tasty, much like the marinara sauce but with some hot pepper in place of the mushrooms. I had it over steamed vegetables ($2.75), of which the zucchini, broccoli and cauliflower were a little overdone and the carrots a little underdone--chewy, that is, but with the unexpected bonus of a sweet raw-carrot flavor.

Desserts are very much in the health-food tradition. I had a peach “cake” ($1.50) shaped like a thick cookie that consisted mostly of oats, peaches, figs and raisins. There was a pleasant peach flavor somewhere in there, but it had the crude texture--mushy and chewy at the same time--that shows up so often in health food that I have to think health foodies positively like it. It hits your stomach like a bowling ball.

There’s room for improvement here, but I do think Naturally Fast is trying to make health food more palatable. The wide selection and cheerful environment certainly help.

Naturally Fast, 11661 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles; (213) 444-7886. Open 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Sunday.

SOUPLANTATION is a chain of restaurants where a pleasant environment is one of the greatest attractions. Like the Pasadena branch we visited, they all have well-lit salad bars of impressive scope, kept scrupulously clean; no wilted spinach or spilled sprouts and no fermenting day-old coleslaw. At the end of the counter, you buy beverages, pay for salad and decide whether to have soup as well (salad alone is $5.95, soup and salad is $7.10). Then someone actually escorts you to a seat in a bright, high-ceilinged dining room.

It’s the soup-and-salad idea done really well, for once, and it has the advantages and disadvantages of the form. You get your own choice of fresh, raw vegetables with a choice of dressings (including particularly good low-calorie versions), plus tasty hot soup if you want. On the other hand, there is a considerable temptation to pig out, and not all the salad items, dressings and soups are equally low in calories. At one time Souplantation placed a sort of menu on every table spelling out which dishes were approved by the American Heart Assn., but apparently they no longer do this.

I piled some spinach and a cup of julienne-cut Hubbard squash on my plate, dressed them with a tablespoon or two of low-calorie Italian dressing and four or five fresh croutons, and added half a cup of three-bean salad and half a cup of tarragon-tuna pasta salad, both excellent (why do most restaurants make dreary three-bean salad?). I had a big bowl of the beefy-tomatoey chili soup, a warm walnut-oat muffin, a couple of slices of melon and some strawberries.

Everything was very good, and I’d go here regardless of health considerations. Not for every sort of meal, though; the bright, echoey room with crowds of people passing through doesn’t quite invite lingering for conversation.

Souplantation, 201 S. Lake St., Pasadena; (818) 577-4797 (other Los Angeles County locations include Arcadia, Alhambra, Torrance, Encino, Marina Marketplace, Beverly Connection and Brentwood). Open 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday.

RESTAURANT LOZANO is one of a kind: a stylish, candle-lit restaurant that features mostly low-calorie versions of Mexican dishes. It’s located in the tiny, isolated business district of Sierra Madre, and it must be one of the few Mexican restaurants where the soundtrack is likely to be Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

Amazingly, the menu bristles with American Heart Assn. symbols; just about everything, it seems, is AHA-approved. Way down at the bottom of the menu, however, it is disclosed that these dishes can be prepared according to AHA principles. Unless you ask for the AHA version, you won’t get it.

For instance, the black-bean soup ($6.75) is fantastically luscious. The AHA version is delicious, too, though substituting yogurt for sour cream makes for a somewhat more austere dish. At any rate, both versions have an excellent black-bean flavor.

Lozano emphasizes chicken and fish in place of red meat. The excellent jerk chicken ($10.95) is dense-textured and flavored with hints of allspice and hot pepper. It comes with tomato rice, a sort of herbed yogurt salad and a rather sweet coleslaw.

The dessert selection is limited to cheesecakes and a yam flan. No AHA symbol here. Lozano is rather off the beaten track, and you have to watch how you order, but it shows that health food can coexist with elegance.

Restaurant Lozano, 44 N. Baldwin Ave., Sierra Madre; (818) 355-5945. Open 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday.

FRAGRANT VEGETABLE also is elegant, with etched-glass windows and soothing green booths, but instead of creating an eclectic health cuisine, it presents (mostly) traditional Chinese vegetarian cookery. Usually, this amounts to Chinese food with mushrooms or Buddhist “mock meats” made of tofu or wheat gluten in place of real meat.

The result is definitely vegetarian, but while the menu claims that some of the dishes are AHA-approved, it doesn’t tell you which ones--you have to ask. Many dishes are fried in oil (in Cantonese cooking, nearly everything is fried at some point in its preparation).

Fortunately, the owner, S. T. Cheung, is alert to modern health-food concerns. Fried dim sum such as fun gor can be steamed, and customers can request some dishes “fried” with water instead of oil. Many dishes are prepared with garlic, which is, strictly speaking, contrary to Buddhist tradition but in accordance with modern ideas of health.

I started out with a big bowl of yin-yang soup ($7.95), which is spinach and corn purees swirled in the traditional yin-yang pattern: pleasant and wholesome-tasting. For a main course, I ordered a dish not listed on the menu but always available, broccoli chicken ($8.95). The gluten “chicken,” served in a black-bean sauce with broccoli and sliced carrot, tastes eerily like the real thing.

One shortcoming of the Fragrant Vegetable is the usual Chinese lack of desserts. The banana fritters are out of the question from a health standpoint, and the sweet soups require a minimum order of four. The best of them, made with a pleasantly crunchy substance called “white fungus,” also contains coconut, which is not recommended for dieters.

So forget about dessert, and reflect on how far we’ve come from the days when health food was limited to dingy lunch counters.

Fragrant Vegetable, 11859 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles; (213) 312-1442. Open 11:30 a.m.-9:45 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 11:30 a.m.-10:45 p.m. Friday-Saturday .