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.
Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life
Max Lugavere - 2018
After his mother was diagnosed with a mysterious form of dementia, Max Lugavere put his successful media career on hold to learn everything he could about brain health and performance. For the better half of a decade, he consumed the most up-to-date scientific research, talked to dozens of leading scientists and clinicians around the world, and visited the country’s best neurology departments—all in the hopes of understanding his mother’s condition.Now, in Genius Foods, Lugavere presents a comprehensive guide to brain optimization. He uncovers the stunning link between our dietary and lifestyle choices and our brain functions, revealing how the foods you eat directly affect your ability to focus, learn, remember, create, analyze new ideas, and maintain a balanced mood.Weaving together pioneering research on dementia prevention, cognitive optimization, and nutritional psychiatry, Lugavere distills groundbreaking science into actionable lifestyle changes. He shares invaluable insights into how to improve your brain power, includingthe nutrients that can boost your memory and improve mental clarity (and where to find them);the foods and tactics that can energize and rejuvenate your brain, no matter your age;a brain-boosting fat-loss method so powerful it has been called “biochemical liposuction”; andthe foods that can improve your happiness, both now and for the long term.With Genius Foods, Lugavere offers a cutting-edge yet practical road map to eliminating brain fog and optimizing the brain’s health and performance today—and decades into the future.
Your Personal Paleo Code: The 3-Step Plan to Lose Weight, Reverse Disease, and Stay Fit and Healthy for Life
Chris Kresser - 2013
But what happens when we hit a wall and weight loss stalls, energy flags, or we're tired of restricted eating? We're not cavemen anymore, so why should we follow a strict caveman diet? In YOUR PERSONAL PALEO CODE, Chris Kresser uses the Paleo diet as a baseline from which you can tailor the ideal three-step program-Reset, Rebuild, Revive-to fit your lifestyle, body type, genetic blueprint, and individual needs. Kresser helps further personalize your prescription for specific health conditions, from heart disease and high blood pressure to thyroid disorders and digestive problems. Along with a 7-day meal plan and delectable, nutritious recipes, YOUR PERSONAL PALEO CODE offers natural solutions and an avalanche of groundbreaking advice on how to restore a healthy gut and immune system; how to eliminate toxins; which fats to eat liberally; how to choose the healthiest proteins; and much more. Best of all, you only have to follow the program 80% of the time; there's room to indulge in moderation while still experiencing dramatic results. Based on cutting-edge scientific research, YOUR PERSONAL PALEO CODE is designed to be flexible and user-friendly, with helpful charts, quizzes, and effective action steps to help you lose weight, reverse disease, and stay fit and healthy for life.
Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal
Melanie Warner - 2013
She began an investigative journey that took her to research labs, university food science departments, and factories around the country. What she discovered provides a rare, eye-opening, and sometimes disturbing, account of what we're really eating. Warner looks at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive, and most nutritionally inferior food in the world, and she uncovers startling evidence about the profound health implications of the packaged and fast foods that we eat on a daily basis.Combining meticulous research, vivid writing, and cultural analysis, Warner blows the lid off the largely undocumented, and lightly regulated, world of chemically treated and processed foods and lays bare the potential price we may pay for consuming even so-called healthy foods.
The Salt Fix: Why the Experts Got It All Wrong--And How Eating More Might Save Your Life
James DiNicolantonio - 2017
The Salt Fix is essential reading for everyone on the keto diet! We've all heard the recommendation: eat no more than a teaspoon of salt a day for a healthy heart. Health-conscious Americans have hewn to the conventional wisdom that your salt shaker can put you on the fast track to a heart attack, and have suffered through bland but "heart-healthy" dinners as a result.What if the low-salt dogma is wrong?Dr. James DiNicolantonio has reviewed more than five hundred publications to unravel the impact of salt on blood pressure and heart disease. He's reached a startling conclusion: The vast majority of us don't need to watch our salt intake. In fact, for most of us, more salt would be advantageous to our nutrition--especially for those of us on the keto diet, as keto depletes this important mineral from our bodies. The Salt Fix tells the remarkable story of how salt became unfairly demonized--a never-before-told drama of competing egos and interests--and took the fall for another white crystal: sugar.According to The Salt Fix, too little salt can: - Make you crave sugar and refined carbs - Send the body into semistarvation mode - Lead to weight gain, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, and increased blood pressure and heart rateBut eating the salt you desire can improve everything, from your sleep, energy, and mental focus to your fitness, fertility, and sexual performance. It can even stave off common chronic illnesses, including heart disease.The Salt Fix shows the best ways to add salt back into your diet, offering his transformative five-step program for recalibrating your salt thermostat to achieve your unique, ideal salt intake. Science has moved on from the low-salt dogma, and so should you--your life may depend on it.
Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
David A. Sinclair - 2019
But what if everything we’ve been taught to believe about aging is wrong? What if we could choose our lifespan? In this groundbreaking book, Dr. David Sinclair, leading world authority on genetics and longevity, reveals a bold new theory for why we age. As he writes: “Aging is a disease, and that disease is treatable.” This book takes us to the frontlines of research many from Dr. David Sinclair’s own lab at Harvard—that demonstrate how we can slow down, or even reverse, aging. The key is activating newly discovered vitality genes, the descendants of an ancient genetic survival circuit that is both the cause of aging and the key to reversing it.
Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself
William W. Li - 2019
Learn how to identify the strategies and the dosages for using food to transform your resilience and health in EAT TO BEAT DISEASE.We have radically underestimated our body's power to transform and restore our health. Pioneering physician scientist, Dr. William Li, empowers readers by showing them the evidence behind over 200 health-boosting foods that can starve cancer, reduce your risk of dementia, and beat dozens of avoidable diseases. EAT TO BEAT DISEASE isn't about what foods to avoid, but rather is a life-changing guide to the hundreds of healing foods to add to your meals that support the body's defense systems, including:PlumsCinnamonJasmine teaRed wine and beerBlack BeansSan Marzano tomatoesOlive oilPacific oystersCheeses like Jarlsberg, Camembert and cheddarSourdough breadThe book's plan shows you how to integrate the foods you already love into any diet or health plan to activate your body's health defense systems-Angiogenesis, Regeneration, Microbiome, DNA Protection, and Immunity-to fight cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, and autoimmune diseases, and other debilitating conditions.Both informative and practical, EAT TO BEAT DISEASE explains the science of healing and prevention, the strategies for using food to actively transform health, and points the science of well-being and disease prevention in an exhilarating new direction.
Dirty Genes: A Breakthrough Program to Treat the Root Cause of Illness and Optimize Your Health
Ben Lynch - 2018
Ben Lynch discovered the root cause—“dirty” genes. Genes can be “born dirty” or merely “act dirty” in response to your environment, diet, or lifestyle—causing lifelong, life-threatening, and chronic health problems, including cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, anxiety, depression, digestive issues, obesity, cancer, and diabetes.Based on his own experience and successfully helping thousands of clients, Dr. Lynch shows you how to identify and optimize both types of dirty genes by cleaning them up with targeted and personalized plans, including healthy eating, good sleep, stress relief, environmental detox, and other holistic and natural means.Many of us believe our genes doom us to the disorders that run in our families. But Dr. Lynch reveals that with the right plan in place, you can eliminate symptoms, and optimize your physical and mental health—and ultimately rewrite your genetic destiny.
Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself
Alejandro Junger - 2009
“The Clean program works….The wisdom and information contained in this book is deeply helpful and life changing.” —Gwyneth PaltrowAs featured on Goop.com!From Alejandro Junger, Eastern medicine specialist, cardiologist, and head of the Integrative Medicine program at Lenox Hill Hospital (as well as a doctor at New York City’s renowned Eleven Eleven Wellness Center), comes the New York Times bestseller, Clean—a medically-proven program that teaches how to remove toxins, rejuvenate our bodies, and restore our natural health.
Eating Animals
Jonathan Safran Foer - 2009
Once he started a family, the moral dimensions of food became increasingly important.Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill.Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is a book that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, places Jonathan Safran Foer "at the table with our greatest philosophers."
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
James Nestor - 2020
Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren't found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of Sao Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe.Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is.Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.
The Longevity Diet: Discover the New Science Behind Stem Cell Activation and Regeneration to Slow Aging, Fight Disease, and Optimize Weight
Valter Longo - 2016
The culmination of 25 years of research on aging, nutrition, and disease across the globe, this unique program lays out a simple solution to living to a healthy old age through nutrition. The key is combining the healthy everyday eating plan the book outlines, with the scientifically engineered fasting-mimicking diet, or FMD; the FMD, done just 3-4 times a year, does away with the misery and starvation most of us experience while fasting, allowing you to reap all the beneficial health effects of a restrictive diet, while avoiding negative stressors, like low energy and sleeplessness. Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at USC and the Program on Longevity and Cancer at IFOM in Milan, designed the FMD after making a series of remarkable discoveries in mice, then in humans, indicating that specific diets can activate stem cells and promote regeneration and rejuvenation in multiple organs to significantly reduce risk for diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease.
Year of No Sugar
Eve O. Schaub - 2014
Do you know where your sugar is coming from?Most likely everywhere. Sure, it's in ice cream and cookies, but what scared Eve O. Schaub was the secret world of sugar--hidden in bacon, crackers, salad dressing, pasta sauce, chicken broth, and baby food.With her eyes open by the work of obesity expert Dr. Robert Lustig and others, Eve challenged her husband and two school-age daughters to join her on a quest to eat no added sugar for an entire year.Along the way, Eve uncovered the real costs of our sugar-heavy American diet--including diabetes, obesity, and increased incidences of health problems such as heart disease and cancer. The stories, tips, and recipes she shares throw fresh light on questionable nutritional advice we've been following for years and show that it is possible to eat at restaurants and go grocery shopping--with less and even no added sugar.Year of No Sugar is what the conversation about "kicking the sugar addiction" looks like for a real American family--a roller coaster of unexpected discoveries and challenges.
Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power
Lisa Mosconi - 2018
And in this eye-opening book from an author who is both a neuroscientist and a certified integrative nutritionist, we learn what should be on our menu.Dr. Lisa Mosconi, whose research spans an extraordinary range of specialties including brain science, the microbiome, and nutritional genomics, notes that the dietary needs of the brain are substantially different from those of the other organs, yet few of us have any idea what they might be. Her innovative approach to cognitive health incorporates concepts that most doctors have yet to learn. Busting through advice based on pseudoscience, Dr. Mosconi provides recommendations for a complete food plan, while calling out noteworthy surprises, including why that paleo diet you are following may not be ideal, why avoiding gluten may be a terrible mistake, and how simply getting enough water can dramatically improve alertness.Including comprehensive lists of what to eat and what to avoid, a detailed quiz that will tell you where you are on the brain health spectrum, and 24 mouth-watering brain-boosting recipes that grow out of Dr. Mosconi's own childhood in Italy, Brain Food gives us the ultimate plan for a healthy brain. Brain Food will appeal to anyone looking to improve memory, prevent cognitive decline, eliminate brain fog, lift depression, or just sharpen their edge.
The Way We Eat Now
Bee Wilson - 2019
The book is a scholarly, but readable exploration of the hidden forces behind what we eat. The author explains how this food revolution has transformed our bodies, our social lives, and the world we live in.