Eat This, Not That!: The No-Diet Weight Loss Solution


David Zinczenko - 2007
    The secret? The revolutionary concept that the battle of the bulge is won not through deprivation and discipline, but by making a series of simple food swaps that can save you hundreds – if not thousands – of calories a day.  EAT THIS, NOT THAT! is the only book that holds the food industry accountable for the surreptitious loads of sugar, fat, and sodium stuffed into foods that were once reliable sources of lean nutrition. It arms you with the savvy tricks and insider information you need to eat well in today’s dangerous food landscape. With EAT THIS, NOT THAT! you're the expert in every eating situation, from the frozen food aisle to your favorite fast food joint to your local sports bar. You control your food universe--and lose the pounds you want--because, unlike every other customer, you'll know the smart choices to make--instantly!  Now get this: The pressure from EAT THIS, NOT THAT! is actually reshaping the food landscape to your benefit! Since it’s original publication in 2007, here’s how some restaurants have responded: · Baskin Robbins eliminated its 2,300-calorie Heath Bar Shake.· Outback Steakhouse downsized its Aussie Cheese Fries from 2,900 calories to 2,140 calories.· Macaroni Grill replaced the 1,120-calorie Kids’ Double Mac ‘n’ Cheese with a more reasonable 670-calorie version.· Restaurants such as Quiznos, Red Lobster, and Olive Garden began publishing nutritional information for the first time ever.· And that’s just to name a few!

Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization


Evan D.G. Fraser - 2010
    Using the colorful diaries of a sixteenth-century merchant as a narrative guide, Empires of Food vividly chronicles the fate of people and societies for the past twelve thousand years through the foods they grew, hunted, traded, and ate—and gives us fascinating, and devastating, insights into what to expect in years to come. In energetic prose, agricultural expert Evan D. G. Fraser and journalist Andrew Rimas tell gripping stories that capture the flavor of places as disparate as ancient Mesopotamia and imperial Britain, taking us from the first city in the once-thriving Fertile Crescent to today’s overworked breadbaskets and rice bowls in the United States and China, showing just what food has meant to humanity. Cities, culture, art, government, and religion are founded on the creation and exchange of food surpluses, complex societies built by shipping corn and wheat and rice up rivers and into the stewpots of history’s generations. But eventually, inevitably, the crops fail, the fields erode, or the temperature drops, and the center of power shifts. Cultures descend into dark ages of poverty, famine, and war. It happened at the end of the Roman Empire, when slave plantations overworked Europe’s and Egypt’s soil and drained its vigor. It happened to the Mayans, who abandoned their great cities during centuries of drought. It happened in the fourteenth century, when medieval societies crashed in famine and plague, and again in the nineteenth century, when catastrophic colonial schemes plunged half the world into a poverty from which it has never recovered. And today, even though we live in an age of astounding agricultural productivity and genetically modified crops, our food supplies are once again in peril. Empires of Food brilliantly recounts the history of cyclic consumption, but it is also the story of the future; of, for example, how a shrimp boat hauling up an empty net in the Mekong Delta could spark a riot in the Caribbean. It tells what happens when a culture or nation runs out of food—and shows us the face of the world turned hungry. The authors argue that neither local food movements nor free market economists will stave off the next crash, and they propose their own solutions. A fascinating, fresh history told through the prism of the dining table, Empires of Food offers a grand scope and a provocative analysis of the world today, indispensable in this time of global warming and food crises.

Eat the Yolks: Discover Paleo, Fight Food Lies, and Reclaim Your Health


Liz Wolfe - 2014
    Avoid red meat. Worry about cholesterol. We live in an era of health hype and nutrition propaganda, and we're suffering for it. Thirty years of avoiding eggs, choosing margarine over butter, and seeking out "low-fat" versions of processed foods have left us with an obesity epidemic, ever-rising rates of chronic disease, and above all, total confusion about what to eat and why. This is a tragedy of bad information, food industry shenanigans, and cheap calories disguised as health food. It turns out that everything we've been told about how to eat is wrong. In Eat the Yolks, Liz Wolfe dismantles today's myths about fat, protein, carbs, calories and nutrients to finds the truths—truths like: Fat and cholesterol aren't bad for us. We need animal protein. Whole grains aren't healthy. Counting calories is a waste of energy. Nutrition doesn't come in a box, bag or capsule. With wit and grace, Wolfe makes a compelling argument for following a Paleo lifestyle. She takes us back to the foods of our ancestors, combining the lessons of history with those of modern science to uncover why whole, real food—the kind humans have been eating for thousands of years—holds the key to good health.

Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome


Will Bulsiewicz - 2020
    Will Bulsiewicz, or "Dr. B," illuminates in this groundbreaking book, the explosion of studies on the microbiome makes it abundantly clear that elimination diets are in fact hazardous to our health. What studies clearly now show--and what Dr. B preaches with his patients--is that gut health is the key to boosting our metabolism, balancing our hormones, and taming the inflammation that causes a host of diseases. And the scientifically proven way to fuel our guts is with dietary fiber from an abundant variety of colorful plants.Forget about the fiber your grandmother used to take--the cutting-edge science on fiber is incredibly exciting. As Dr. B explains, fiber energizes our gut microbes to create powerhouse postbiotics called short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that are essential to our health. SCFAs are scientifically proven to promote weight loss, repair leaky gut, strengthen the microbiome, optimize the immune system, reduce food sensitivities, lower cholesterol, reverse type 2 diabetes, improve brain function, and even prevent cancer. Restrictive fad diets starve the gut of the critical fiber we need, weaken the microbes, and make our system vulnerable.As a former junk-food junkie, Dr. B knows firsthand the power of fiber to dramatically transform our health. The good news is that our guts can be trained. Fiber-rich, real foods--with fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, and legumes--start working quickly and maintain your long-term health, promote weight loss, and allow you to thrive and feel great from the inside out.With a 28-day jumpstart program with menus and more than 65 recipes, along with essential advice on food sensitivities, Fiber Fueled offers the blueprint to start turbocharging your gut for lifelong health today.

The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat


Loren Cordain - 2001
    This book presents readers with a program that causes weight loss in overweight people - up to seventy-five pounds in six months while normalizing blood cholesterol, and increasing energy levels.

French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure


Mireille Guiliano - 2004
    The million copy, ultimate #1 bestseller that is changing the way Americans eat and liveDon't DietEat ChocolateDrink WineTake Long WalksEnjoy LifeStay Slim the French way Experience the joie de vivre of French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano.

Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness


Roy Richard Grinker - 2021
    In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma. The preeminent historian of medicine, Sander Gilman, calls Nobody’s Normal “the most important work on stigma in more than half a century.”

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects


Weston A. Price - 1939
    Instead of looking at people afflicted with disease symptoms, this highly-respected dentist and dental researcher chose to focus on healthy individuals, and challenged himself to understand how they achieved such amazing health. Dr. Price traveled to hundreds of cities in a total of 14 different countries in his search to find healthy people. He investigated some of the most remote areas in the world. He observed perfect dental arches, minimal tooth decay, high immunity to tuberculosis and overall excellent health in those groups of people who ate their indigenous foods. He found when these people were introduced to modernized foods, such as white flour, white sugar, refined vegetable oils and canned goods, signs of degeneration quickly became quite evident. Dental caries, deformed jaw structures, crooked teeth, arthritis and a low immunity to tuberculosis became rampant amongst them. Dr. Price documented this ancestral wisdom including hundreds of photos in his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat


Matt Siegel - 2021
    Is Italian olive oil really Italian, or are we dipping our bread in lamp oil? Why are we masochistically drawn to foods that can hurt us, like hot peppers? Far from being a classic American dish, is apple pie actually . . . English?“As a species, we’re hardwired to obsess over food,” Matt Siegel explains as he sets out “to uncover the hidden side of everything we put in our mouths.” Siegel also probes subjects ranging from the myths—and realities—of food as aphrodisiac, to how one of the rarest and most exotic spices in all the world (vanilla) became a synonym for uninspired sexual proclivities, to the role of food in fairy- and morality tales.

Breaking the Food Seduction: The Hidden Reasons Behind Food Cravings--And 7 Steps to End Them Naturally


Neal D. Barnard - 2003
    Neal Barnard has the solution to conquering your food addictions. Backed up by scientific research, Breaking the Food Seduction explains that your biochemistry, not your lack of willpower, is the problem. Dr. Barnard reveals the simple dietary and lifestyle changes that can break the stubborn cycle of cravings and make you free to choose healthy and tasty foods that can help to you lose weight, lower cholesterol, and improve your overall health.Featuring a 3-week kickstart plan and 100 delicious, satisfying recipes.

Beautiful Bodies: A Memoir


Kimberly Rae Miller - 2017
    And trying. And trying some more. She's been at it since she was four years old, when Sesame Street inspired her to go on her first diet. Postcollege, after a brief stint as a diet-pill model, she became a health-and-fitness writer and editor working on celebrities' bestselling bios—sugarcoating the trials and tribulations celebs endure to stay thin. Needless to say, Kim has spent her life in pursuit of the ideal body.But what is the ideal body? Knowing she's far from alone in this struggle, Kim sets out to find the objective definition of this seemingly unattainable level of perfection. While on a fascinating and hilarious journey through time that takes her from obese Paleolithic cavewomen, to the bland menus that Drs. Graham and Kellogg prescribed to promote good morals in addition to good health, to the binge-drinking-prone regimen that caused William the Conqueror's body to explode at his own funeral, Kim ends up discovering a lot about her relationship with her own body.Warm, funny, and brutally honest, Beautiful Bodies is a blend of memoir and social history that will speak to anyone who's ever been caught in a power struggle with his or her own body—in other words, just about everyone.

The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Astonishing Dialogue Taking Place in Our Bodies Impacts Health, Weight, and Mood


Emeran Mayer - 2015
    While the dialogue between the gut and the brain has been recognized by ancient healing traditions, including Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, Western medicine has failed to appreciate the complexity of how the brain, gut, and more recently, the microbiome—the microorganisms that live inside us—communicate with one another. In The Mind-Gut Connection, Dr. Emeran Mayer, executive director of the UCLA Center for Neurobiology of Stress, offers a revolutionary look at this developing science, teaching us how to harness the power of the mind-gut connection to take charge of our health.The Mind-Gut Connection shows how to keep the brain-gut communication clear and balanced to:• heal the gut by focusing on a plant-based diet• balance the microbiome by consuming fermented foods and probiotics, fasting, and cutting out sugar and processed foods• promote weight loss by detoxifying and creating healthy digestion and maximum nutrient absorption• boost immunity and prevent the onset of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s andAlzheimer’s• generate a happier mindset and reduce fatigue, moodiness, anxiety, and depression• prevent and heal GI disorders such as leaky gut syndrome, food sensitivities and allergies, and IBS, as well as digestive discomfort such as heartburn and bloating• and much more.

Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream


Jason Fagone - 2006
    Ed “Cookie” Jarvis. Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas. Joey “Jaws” Chestnut. Will such names one day be looked back upon as the pioneers of a new manifestation of the irrepressible American appetite for competition, money, fame, and self-transformation? They will if the promoters of the newly emerging sport of competitive eating have their way. In Horsemen of the Esophagus, Jason Fagone reports on the year he spent in the belly of this awakening beast.Fagone’s trek takes him to 27 eating contests on two continents, from the World Grilled Cheese Eating Championship in Venice Beach, California, to Nagoya, Japan, where he pursues an interview with the legendary Takeru Kobayashi, perhaps the most prodigious eater in the world today, and to the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island, the sport’s annual grand finale, where Kobayashi has eaten more than 50 dogs in 12 minutes. Along the way, Fagone discovers an absurd, sometimes troubling subculture on the make, ready to bust out of its county fair and neighborhood-fat-guys niche and grab a juicy piece of the big-time television sports/Vegas spectacle jackpot. Fagone meets promoters like George Shea, the P. T. Barnum of the International Federation of Competitive Eating (aka IFOCE, “the governing body of all stomach-centric sport”) and enters the lives of three “gurgitators”: David “Coondog” O’Karma, a fiftyish, six-two house painter from Ohio who’s “not ready to become invisible”; Bill “El Wingador” Simmons, the Philly Wing Bowl legend who is shooting for a fifth chicken-eating championship despite the fact that it may be killing him; and Tim “Eater X” Janus, a lean young Wall Street trader who takes a seriously scientific and athletic approach to the pursuit of ingesting mountains of food in record-breaking times. Each in his own way feels as if he has lost or not yet found something essential in life, and each is driven by the desperate hope that through consumption he may yet find redemption, that even in the junkiest of America’s junk culture, true nourishment might be found. After all, as it says on the official IFOCE seal: In Voro Veritas (In Gorging, Truth).With forays into the gastrointestinal mechanics of the alimentary canal (“it’s what unbuilds the world to build you,” but, hey, you can skip that part if you like), the techniques and tricks of the experienced gurgitators (pouring a little club soda on top of high-carb foods makes them easier to swallow), and the historical roots of the competitive eating phenomenon, Horsemen of the Esophagus gives the French something else to dislike about America. And it gives the rest of us food for thought about the bizarre and unlikely places the American Dream can sometimes lead.Also available as an eBookFrom the Hardcover edition.

Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History


Sidney W. Mintz - 1985
    Traces the history of sugar production and consumption, examines its relationship with slavery, class ambitions, and industrialization, and describes sugar's impact on modern diet and eating habits.

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche


Ethan Watters - 2009
    But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In "Crazy Like Us," Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves.For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties." Crazy Like Us" documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug.But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.