Nutrition is one of my favorite nonfiction topics to learn about. Our food choices are something that we have control over when we understand we have the ability to make changes for our health. It’s also something that affects us every single day, likely three or four times a day. Some experts say it is the most important thing we can pay attention to for our health.
March is National Nutrition Month. In honor of that I’m sharing three of my favorite lesser known but great books about nutrition. These books are informative engrossing reads that tend to combine history and science to give a full picture look into this ever changing and developing topic.
I’m also currently reading Deep Nutrition by Dr. Catherine Shanahan. It’s my March book pick for my year of health experiment. I’m about a third of the way through and I believe it will make it onto future books about nutrition lists.
Great Books about Nutrition:
Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health by Jo Robinson
During one of my periods of reading a bunch of dietary books, I stumbled on this by chance at our local used bookstore. I’m so glad I decided to give it a try!
In Eating on the Wild Side, Jo Robinson discloses that humans have unknowingly been destroying the nutritional value of food since the first farmers 10,000 years ago. The plant varieties selected to continue cultivating are often high in sugar and starch while low in fiber, minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants. With years of scientific research, Robinson points out modern varieties of fruit and vegetables that contain nutrients most similar to wild plants from long ago and how choosing those can improve our health and quality of life.
“Most native plants are also higher in protein and fiber and much lower in sugar than the ones we’ve devised. The ancestor of our modern corn is a grass plant called teosinte that is native to central Mexico. Its kernels are about 30 percent protein and 2 percent sugar. Old-fashioned sweet corn is 4 percent protein and 10 percent sugar. Some of the newest varieties of supersweet corn are as high as 40 percent sugar.”
Why I Loved it:
This book is an amazing combination of food history and practical advice. It’s split into two parts. The first covers vegetables, the second fruits. Each chapter dives into a particular family of produce explaining the varieties that were eaten by our ancestors, how we’ve whittled these down to the types grown today, and what the most nutrient dense choices are. Robinson also covers how to select the best of the bunch, how to store produce at home for optimal nutrition, and simple recipes to enhance the flavor and nutrients of these vegetables and fruits.
Eating on the Wild Side was the right book for me at the right time. It encouraged me to look for varieties of fruits and vegetables I’d never eaten before. This was also the year that we finally settled down and were able to start shopping at our farmer’s market every week for the season to get the freshest produce we could. It also inspired me to research varieties we couldn’t find to consider growing in our own garden.
The science that Robinson gets into was fascinating to me as well. This book introduced me to micronutrients I wasn’t familiar with. It broke down antioxidants into categories and functions that I’d never studied before. After I read it, I handed it off to my husband. From there it made its way to different family members. With the information on different nutrient dense varieties and easy recipes, this is a great reference book to keep around.
Food Can Fix It: The Superfood Switch to Fight Fat, Defy Aging, and Eat Your Way Healthy by Dr. Mehmet Oz
In Food Can Fix It, Dr. Oz shares the power of food to improve, decrease, and heal many common health issues. He believes that food can be medicine. By choosing carefully what we put into our bodies we can improve our lives.
The first part of the book, Food Foundations, covers how food can work as medicine and the “5 Food Fixes” strategy makes it easy to remember how to eat. These fixes include fats with benefits, ideal protein, extra fruits and vegetables, energizing carbohydrates, and special occasion sugar.
The second part of the book goes into depth about ideal food fixes for specific health concerns like heart disease, fatigue, pain, and maintaining a healthy gut. Foods to improve weight loss, mood, brain power, and immunity are also discussed.
Part three gives ideas and examples for how to apply this switch to your own life and diet. Dr. Oz shares a 21 day plan with several breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack recipes to make. The final chapters go beyond that with a strategy for creating your own meals, many more recipes, tips, tactics, and instructions for a 3 day cleanse.
What I Liked:
I read this book a few years ago. While I didn’t follow its plan rigorously, it was one of the first I read that tied everything together illustrating that food is not merely fuel. By choosing what you consume wisely, you can feel better and heal naturally. It was very empowering to read about the ways we may be able to take our health into our own hands by treating food as medicine.
I thought the breakdown of food fixes for particular illnesses by chapter would be helpful to a lot of people. Food Can Fix It contains the most recipes by far of these books about nutrition if you’re looking for that sort of practical application.
I also found it very easy and quick to read. It’s the least heavy on scientific studies and research quotes. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your preferences.
Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest for Nutritional Perfection by Catherine Price
I first heard of this book on an episode of Gastropod, a podcast that discusses food with a side of science and history. Journalist Catherine Price was a guest explaining the history of vitamins and how their discovery made the development of processed food possible. The episode was so interesting, I knew I needed to check out her book!
In Vitamania, Price covers the past, present, and future of vitamins. She combines history and science to give an overall introduction to these relatively newly discovered micronutrients. She shines a light on how popular supplements have become and how that can be harmful to our personal and national health. Dietary supplements are now a massive and powerful industry that doesn’t fall under FDA regulation. With many people focusing on this tiny aspect of nutrition, the bigger picture of our food gets missed.
“But while it’s true that a healthy diet must include vitamins, vitamins themselves do not define a healthy diet. There are too many other important compounds in food.”
Why I Recommend Reading This Book:
This book is the most scientifically dense of these books about nutrition. It took me awhile to read and while the information wasn’t very positive, it was fascinating.
Vitamania covers everything to do with vitamins. It begins with how science skirted around the discovery of vitamins for years with diseases like scurvy and berberi before technology was advanced enough to identify the micronutrients involved. The industrialization of vitamins and the outsourcing of factories is also discussed. The book digs into the way vitamins advanced our military by making MREs (meals ready to eat) possible. It gets into the ethics of a 100+ billion dollar supplementation industry as well.
There are two points that have stayed with me the most in the three years since I’ve read this. One is the fact that the supplementation industry isn’t regulated so buyer beware. The other is the fact that our food is so nutritiously depleted that we have to pump synthetic vitamins back into it to avoid disease deficiencies. These synthetic vitamins are now produced in other countries and shipped in, leaving the United States nutritiously vulnerable.
Is nutrition a health topic you enjoy learning about? What are your favorite books about nutrition? Please share in the comments below.
