Book picks similar to
The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat by Alan Levinovitz
non-fiction
science
health
food
Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently
David Ludwig - 2015
If you have ever been frustrated by failure after failure to count calories, this dietary approach is for you. Dr. Ludwig's approach allows calories to work for you. Dr. Ludwig goes into detail of how he has scientifically discovered the fact that not all calories are equal.Through a series of three phases the Always Hungry eating plan allows the dieter to conquer the cravings that always sabotage the best diet plans on the market. This is not a one week diet trip that you will jump off at first trouble, rather, this is a three phase life journey that will enhance your life and free you from eating foods (even food thought to be good like low-fat foods) that hold your body hostage.
The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Bill Bryson - 2019
Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up.A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything, this book will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again.
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Ed Yong - 2016
Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us—the microbiome—build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. In this astonishing book, Ed Yong takes us on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery. Yong, whose humor is as evident as his erudition, prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light—less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are. The microbes in our bodies are part of our immune systems and protect us from disease. Those in cows and termites digest the plants they eat. In the deep oceans, mysterious creatures without mouths or guts depend on microbes for all their energy. Bacteria provide squids with invisibility cloaks, help beetles to bring down forests, and allow worms to cause diseases that afflict millions of people. I Contain Multitudes is the story of these extraordinary partnerships, between the creatures we are familiar with and those we are not. It reveals how we humans are disrupting these partnerships and how we might manipulate them for our own good. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.
An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives
Matt Richtel - 2019
An epic, first-of-its-kind book, entwining leading-edge scientific discovery with the intimate stories of four individual lives, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist.A terminal cancer patient rises from the grave. A medical marvel defies HIV. Two women with autoimmunity discover their own bodies have turned against them. Matt Richtel's An Elegant Defense uniquely entwines these intimate stories with science’s centuries-long quest to unlock the mysteries of sickness and health, and illuminates the immune system as never before.The immune system is our body’s essential defense network, a guardian vigilantly fighting illness, healing wounds, maintaining order and balance, and keeping us alive. Its legion of microscopic foot soldiers—from T cells to “natural killers”—patrols our body, linked by a nearly instantaneous communications grid. It has been honed by evolution over millennia to face an almost infinite array of threats.For all its astonishing complexity, however, the immune system can be easily compromised by fatigue, stress, toxins, advanced age, and poor nutrition—hallmarks of modern life—and even by excessive hygiene. Paradoxically, it is a fragile wonder weapon that can turn on our own bodies with startling results, leading today to epidemic levels of autoimmune disorders.Richtel effortlessly guides readers on a scientific detective tale winding from the Black Plague to twentieth-century breakthroughs in vaccination and antibiotics, to the cutting-edge laboratories that are revolutionizing immunology—perhaps the most extraordinary and consequential medical story of our time. The foundation that Richtel builds makes accessible revelations about cancer immunotherapy, the microbiome, and autoimmune treatments that are changing millions of lives. An Elegant Defense also captures in vivid detail how these powerful therapies, along with our behavior and environment, interact with the immune system, often for the good but always on a razor’s edge that can throw this remarkable system out of balance.Drawing on his groundbreaking reporting for the New York Times and based on extensive new interviews with dozens of world-renowned scientists, Matt Richtel has produced a landmark book, equally an investigation into the deepest riddles of survival and a profoundly human tale that is movingly brought to life through the eyes of his four main characters, each of whom illuminates an essential facet of our “elegant defense.”
The Chronic Cough Enigma: How to recognize, diagnose and treat neurogenic and reflux related cough
Jamie A. Koufman - 2014
The Chronic Cough Enigma is written for people who have been coughing for months or years and cannot get useful answers from their doctors.More than 20 million Americans suffer from what is known as enigmatic chronic cough. This book provides insights from Dr. Jamie Koufman’s almost forty years of successfully managing thousands of long-suffering cough patients. Indeed, the typical chronic cough patient who comes to her office has been coughing for more than a decade. This book provides the many who suffer from chronic cough new and potentially life-changing information and the potential to be cured.
Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying)
Bill Gifford - 2015
We visit cutting-edge labs where scientists are working to "hack" the aging process, like purging "senescent" cells from mice to reverse the effects of aging. He'll reveal why some people live past 100 without even trying, what has happened with resveratrol, the "red wine pill" that made headlines a few years ago, how your fat tissue is trying to kill you, and how it's possible to unlock longevity-promoting pathways that are programmed into our very genes. Gifford separates the wheat from the chaff as he exposes hoaxes and scams foisted upon an aging society, and arms readers with the best possible advice on what to do, what not to do, and what life-changing treatments may be right around the corner. An intoxicating mixture of deep reporting, fascinating science, and prescriptive takeaway, Spring Chicken will reveal the extraordinary breakthroughs that may yet bring us eternal youth, while exposing dangerous deceptions that prey on the innocent and ignorant.
Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It
Larry Olmsted - 2016
Lobster rolls containing no lobster at all. Extra-virgin olive oil that isn’t. Fake foods are in our supermarkets, our restaurants, and our kitchen cabinets. Award-winning food journalist and travel writer Larry Olmsted exposes this pervasive and dangerous fraud perpetrated on unsuspecting Americans. Real Food/Fake Food brings readers into the unregulated food industry, revealing that this shocking deception extends from high-end foods like olive oil, wine, and Kobe beef to everyday staples such as coffee, honey, juice, and cheese. It’s a massive bait and switch where counterfeiting is rampant and where the consumer ultimately pays the price. But Olmsted does more than show us what foods to avoid. A bona fide gourmand, he travels to the sources of the real stuff, to help us recognize what to look for, eat, and savor: genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano from Italy, fresh-caught grouper from Florida, authentic port from Portugal. Real foods that are grown, raised, produced, and prepared with care by masters of their craft. Part cautionary tale, part culinary crusade, Real Food/Fake Food is addictively readable, mouth-wateringly enjoyable, and utterly relevant. Larry Olmsted convinces us why real food matters.
Younger Next Year for Women
Chris Crowley - 2004
And because you’re already more attuned to your physical and emotional needs, and more inclined to commit to a healthier lifestyle, you're poised to live brilliantly for the thirty-plus years after menopause. All you need now is the program outlined in Younger Next Year for Women—which, for starters, will help you avoid literally 70 percent of the decay and eliminate 50 percent of the injuries and illnesses associated with getting older. How? Drawn from disciplines as varied as evolutionary biology, cell physiology, experimental psychology and anthropology, the science behind Younger Next Year is clear. Our bodies are programmed to do one of two things: either grow or decay. Sitting in front of a screen all day tells the body to decay. Taking a walk or doing yoga tells the body to grow. Loneliness and stress trigger decay; love and laughter trigger growth. Just as clear as the science is the goal: Become the active gatekeeper of your own body and gain the power to control those signals of growth and decay. Seven simple rules show the way, from #1 Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life, to #6 Care, to #7 Connect and commit. They’re called Harry’s Rules, named for the doctor and coauthor—Henry S. Lodge, M.D.—who formulated them, and who explains the precise science behind each one. But since it’s one thing to know something’s good for you and quite another to put it into practice, Dr. Lodge, the scientist, is joined by Chris Crowley—coauthor, exhorter and living example—whose brusque charm and infectious enthusiasm will actually have you living by the rules. So, congratulations. You’re now about to get younger.
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
Mary Roach - 2013
The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of—or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists—who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts.Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.
The Wahls Protocol : How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine
Terry Wahls - 2014
Terry Wahls focused on treating her patients’ ailments with drugs or surgical procedures—until she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2000. Within three years, her back and stomach muscles had weakened to the point where she needed a tilt-recline wheelchair. Conventional medical treatments were failing her, and she feared that she would be bedridden for the rest of her life. Dr. Wahls began studying the latest research on autoimmune disease and brain biology, and decided to get her vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and essential fatty acids from the food she ate rather than pills and supplements. Dr. Wahl’s adopted the nutrient-rich paleo diet, gradually refining and integrating it into a regimen of neuromuscular stimulation. First, she walked slowly, then steadily, and then she biked eighteen miles in a single day. In November 2011, Dr. Wahls shared her remarkable recovery in a TEDx talk that immediately went viral. Now, in The Wahls Protocol, she shares the details of the protocol that allowed her to reverse many of her symptoms, get back to her life, and embark on a new mission: to share the Wahls Protocol with others suffering from the ravages of multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune conditions.
Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works
Evelyn Tribole - 1995
But the problem is not you, it's that dieting, with its emphasis on rules and regulations, has stopped you from listening to your body. Written by two prominent nutritionists, "Intuitive Eating" focuses on nurturing your body rather than starving it, encourages natural weight loss, and helps you find the weight you were meant to be. Learn: *How to reject diet mentality forever*How our three Eating Personalities define our eating difficulties*How to feel your feelings without using food*How to honor hunger and feel fullness*How to follow the ten principles of Intuitive Eating, step-by-step*How to achieve a new and safe relationship with food and, ultimately, your body With much more compassionate, thoughtful advice on satisfying, healthy living, this newly revised edition also includes a chapter on how the Intuitive Eating philosophy can be a safe and effective model on the path to recovery from an eating disorder.
Just Eat It: How intuitive eating can help you get your shit together around food
Laura Thomas - 2019
It's part of a movement to give women power and control over our bodies. To free us from restrictive dieting, disordered eating and punishing exercise. To reject the guilt and anxiety associated with eating and, ultimately, to help us feel good about ourselves."Truly life-changing" Dolly Alderton, bestselling author of Everything I Know About LoveThis anti-diet guide from registered nutritionist Laura Thomas PhD can help you sort out your attitude to food and ditch punishing exercise routines. As a qualified practitioner of Intuitive Eating - a method that helps followers tune in to innate hunger and fullness cues - Thomas gives you the freedom to enjoy food on your own terms.There are no rules: only simple, practical tools and exercises including mindfulness techniques to help you recognise physiological and emotional hunger, sample conversations with friends and colleagues, and magazine and blog critiques that call out diet culture.So, have you ever been on a diet? Spent time worrying that you looked fat when you could have been doing something useful? Compared the size of your waistline to someone else's? Felt guilt, actual guilt, about the serious crime of . . . eating a doughnut? You're not alone. Just Eat It gives you everything you need to develop a more trusting, healthy relationship with food and your body.
Devoured: From Chicken Wings to Kale Smoothies--How What We Eat Defines Who We Are
Sophie Egan - 2016
Egan explores why these values make for such an unstable, and often unhealthy, food culture and, paradoxically, why they also make America’s cuisine so great.Egan raises a host of intriguing questions: Why does McDonald’s have 107 items on its menu? Why are breakfast sandwiches, protein bars, and gluten-free anything so popular? Will bland, soul-less meal replacements like Soylent revolutionize our definition of a meal? The search for answers takes her across the culinary landscape, from the prioritization of convenience over health to the unintended consequences of “perks” like free meals for employees; the American obsession with “having it our way” to the surge of Starbucks, Chipotle, and other chains individualizing the eating experience; from high culture—artisan and organic and what exactly “natural” means—to low culture—the sale of 100 million Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos in ten weeks. She also looks at how America’s cuisine—like the nation itself—has been shaped by diverse influences from across the globe.Forked weaves together insights from the fields of psychology, anthropology, food science, and behavior economics as well as myriad examples from daily life to create a powerful and unique look at food in America.
Sleep Smarter: 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to A Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success
Shawn Stevenson - 2014
Here's just a sampling of what you're going to discover:
Why you need to sleep more and exercise less to get the best fitness results.
How to feel more energized and refreshed on less hours of sleep.
Why poor sleep quality depresses brain function and leads to poor performance.
What supplements are safe and helpful, and which ones to avoid (this will shock you!)
What exercises you can do to instantly improve your sleep quality.
How the clothes you wear to bed can depress your hormone function.
Why sleep is the missing ingredient in long-term fat loss (clinically proven!)
Why going to bed at the right time is more important than how many hours you sleep.
What mineral deficiency can cause severe sleep problems (and how to fix it).
The surprising impact that intimacy has on your sleep quality.
How to calm your mind so that you can fall asleep faster.
This and much more inside, so open the book and begin to Sleep Smarter now!Shawn Stevenson is the creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the #1 Nutrition and Fitness podcast on itunes, and a leading health expert who's transformed the lives of thousands of people around the world. A graduate of The University of Missouri - St. Louis with a background in biology and kinesiology, Shawn went on to be the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a successful company that provides Wellness Services for both individuals and organizations worldwide. Shawn is a dynamic keynote speaker who has spoken for TEDx, universities, and numerous organizations with outstanding reviews. To learn more, visit the author's website at TheShawnStevensonModel.com
Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live
Marlene Zuk - 2013
Contrary to what the glossy magazines would have us believe, we do not enjoy potato chips because they crunch just like the insects our forebears snacked on. As Zuk argues, such beliefs incorrectly assume that we’re stuck—finished evolving—and have been for tens of thousands of years. She draws on fascinating evidence that examines everything from adults’ ability to drink milk to the texture of our ear wax to show that we’ve actually never stopped evolving. Our nostalgic visions of an ideal evolutionary past in which we ate, lived, and reproduced as we were “meant to” fail to recognize that we were never perfectly suited to our environment. Evolution is about change, and every organism is full of trade-offs.From debunking the caveman diet to unraveling gender stereotypes, Zuk gives an analysis of widespread paleofantasies and the scientific evidence that undermines them, all the while broadening our understanding of our origins and what they can really tell us about our present and our future.