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Healthy Eating Books
These recommended healthy eating books differ in point of view. They disagree, for example, on the roles of meat, fat, dairy, and cooked food in a healthy diet. But, they all contain substantial information about nutrition, food preparation, and the philosophy behind a whole food diet.
Because each book is different, none can be all things for all people, and none are perfect.
They address different aspects of real food (or "whole food"), but it's easy to see what they have in common. These healthy eating books offer plenty of choices for finding the best diet for each individual.
Getting Started
Eating Clean For Dummies, 2nd ed., by Dr. Jonathan Wright, MD, and Linda Johnson Larsen (2016), 408 pp.
Here's a way to get started with real food. In clean eating, there's one goal: avoiding processed foods.
There's an introduction to nutrition, and there's seven chapters of tips for changing your diet.
From this book, you can get the motivation for changing your diet: to understand the nutrition is to "get it." You can get some idea of what's involved, and get lots of ideas on ways to proceed.
Read my full review of Eating Clean For Dummies.
The Color Code: A Revolutionary Eating Plan for Optimum Health by James A. Joseph (2003), 320 pp.
Blueberry researcher James A. Joseph presents more than 40 colorful fruits and veggies. He explains that the pigments--green, red, orange, yellow, purple, and blue--are actually antioxidants, and discusses the amazing things that the antioxidants do.
He teaches you how to break the color code and suggests a fun eating program based on colors.
Read my full review of The Color Code.
Real Food
These books involve exciting programs and special cuisines that motivated me to try new foods! I think everyone needs Nourishing Traditions, but there's no substitute for looking at other theories and cuisines. It's as if there are so many kinds of real food that each adds something you can't get anywhere else.
Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats by Sally Fallon (2001), 674 pp.
This is both a cookbook and a summary of nutritional research! Its indispensable 78-page discussion of nutrition research (188 references) ranges from Weston Price's studies of traditional diets to the latest research on the unique benefits of animal fats.
(It's the defense of natural saturated fats that makes a cookbook so politically incorrect—and public health agencies are starting to catch up to this research.)
Traditional food includes healthy fats and traditionally cooked meats, fermented foods, organ meats, traditional whole grain foods, fruit, vegetables, and sauces.
There are more than 700 recipes, focused on traditional European cooking and artisanal food crafting, including making fermented foods such as traditionally made sauerkraut and kefir. The cookbook includes the why and how of: soaking whole grains before cooking; raw milk; the value of butter and other natural fats; and homemade foods of every kind. The recipes are complex.
Read my full review of Nourishing Traditions.
American Wholefoods Cuisine: 1300 Meatless Wholesome Recipes from Short Order to Gourmet by Nikki and David Goldbeck (1983), 580 pp.
This cookbook has more than 1300 recipes and lots of food preparation instructions. The recipes, all vegetarian, feature grains, beans, vegetables, and fruit (with some milk, cheese, eggs, and tofu) and include many ethnic cuisines.
The large section, "Short-Order Cooking," contains recipes for simple, fast meals. These do use basic cooking techniques (the cookbook has information elsewhere on no-cook meals), but many of the results are incredibly sophisticated for the amount of time invested. The basic cooking techniques are described in detail at the beginner level in a terrific section, "On Cooking."
Other information is an explanation of whole foods (here called "wholefoods") and a whole food diet, how to plan meals, suggested menus, how to assemble a pantry, freezing, canning, making yogurt, and sprouting.
Fantastic all-around cookbook: the heavy, the light, the simple, the gourmet, the international, and the all-American!
See this outstanding cookbook on Amazon:
American Wholefoods Cuisine
Healing With Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition, 3rd ed. by Paul Pitchford (2002), 784 pp.
This book is based in part on the medicinal use of food in traditional Chinese medicine, as well as on up-to-date research on whole foods. In Chinese medicine there is only a small role for animal products (for the very deficient and weak). Pitchford emphasizes whole grains and green foods (such as wheatgrass juice, seaweed, and algae). Particularly valuable are what he calls regeneration diets, with instructions and rationales, for healing serious degenerative diseases.
There is a large section of food preparation and recipes, which range from the simple preparation of whole grains to one-pot meals to more complex homemade fermented foods. The Chinese medicine concepts are not necessarily for beginners, but many of the recipes are.
See my favorite whole foods cookbook (and favorite Chinese medicine book) on Amazon:
Healing With Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition (3rd Edition)
Aveline Kushi's Complete Guide to Macrobiotic Cooking For Health, Harmony, and Peace by Aveline Kushi (1985), 414 pp.
Macrobiotics is a philosophy of food and life based on Asian traditions. It is a whole food diet that emphasizes brown rice, beans, steamed and fermented vegetables, and Asian foods and techniques.
See this useful cookbook on Amazon:
Aveline Kushi's Complete Guide to Macrobiotic Cooking: For Health, Harmony, and Peace
Motivating Yourself
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (2008), 256 pp.
All about "edible foodlike substances" that masquerade as real food, and how to tell the difference. Do you know the difference between junk food and real food? Are you sure?
Read my full review of In Defense of Food.
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price (1939), 528 pp.
Don't be put off by the title. It sounds boring or scary or both, but it isn't.
It's actually very readable, but what's amazing are the photographs. Weston Price documented his work with traditional people around the world, in part through photographs.
You'll never forget the photos of people along with the descriptions of their diets. After seeing them, you'll be able to see the effects of diet everywhere.
Read my full review of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.
Sugar Blues by William Dufty (1975), 256 pp.
The absolutely classic book to motivate yourself to get off sugar.
It's a pretty interesting personal account, plus the real story of the damage that the white powder has done to us for the last couple hundred years. It blew everybody's minds in 1975 and reads just as well now.
Read my full review of Sugar Blues.
Healthy Fats
Eat Fat Lose Fat by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon (2005), 304 pp.
"Obesity is actually a symptom of nutritional deficiencies," write the authors--one a biochemist (author of Know Your Fats) and the other the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation (author of Nourishing Traditions).
They spell out three healthy eating programs: one for weight loss, one for health recovery, and one "everyday gourmet."
On these programs, no one will yo-yo or go hungry. The odds are good that cravings will be eliminated, too.
Read my full review of Eat Fat Lose Fat.
Know Your Fats: A Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils, and Cholesterol by Mary Enig (2009), 358 pp.
What's so bad about trans fat? This somewhat technical book by biochemist Mary Enig is an encyclopedia of the plethora of healthy fats in a wide range of foods.
And it exposes the disgusting truth about synthetic trans fat: fat that actually gums up the works!
Drily written but by an expert specialist.
Read my full review of Know Your Fats.
Fat and Cholesterol are Good for You by Uffe Ravnskov (2009), 244 pp.
Fat and cholesterol are good for you? How could that be?
Medical researcher Uffe Ravnskov, MD, read all the original scientific papers that are cited to claim that cholesterol is bad and that fat kills. Only to find that those papers either say something different or lack data!
Then he describes the studies that the show the opposite--that cholesterol and fat really are good. I even stopped worrying about familial hypercholesterolemia when I found out the whole story on that.
There's a lot of research cited to follow up on, too, if you're interested in doing that. But in the book it's discussed in ordinary language for the general reader.
Read my full review of Fat and Cholesterol are Good For You!
The Coconut Oil Miracle, 5th ed., by Bruce Fife (2013), 303 pp.
This is the book that revived the world market for coconuts! Once word got out about this superfood from the Pacific Islands, everyone wanted the benefits of coconut oil, coconut milk, and coconut water.
It also taught me the basics of buying and eating an unfamiliar food--one that turned out to significantly relieve pain, add energy, and quash infections.
Read my full review of The Coconut Oil Miracle.
Coconut Cures by Bruce Fife (2005), 256 pp.
More by the expert author of The Coconut Oil Miracle. More details on coconut oil and its health benefits; specific suggestions for health conditions. Personal stories, too.
Outstandingly useful!
Read my full review of Coconut Cures.
Enzymes
Enzyme Nutrition: The Food Enzyme Concept by Edward Howell (1985), 175 pp.
This is a a short, succinct book written by enzyme researcher Edward Howell to summarize his lifetime findings. It's an overview of how enzymes work, how digestion requires enzymes, and how and why to get more enzymes in food.
Read my full review of Enzyme Nutrition.
The Complete Book of Enzyme Therapy by Anthony J. Cichoke (1999), 492 pp.
Learn how to use enzyme supplements and how to find high-enzyme foods. There's a 78-page introduction to enzymes and 150 medical conditions listed and discussed, each with suggested enzyme supplements and vitamin and mineral supplements.
Although most of the book is about supplements, this is the best source I've found about which foods are high-enzyme and how to use them.
Read my full review of The Complete Book of Enzyme Therapy.
Enzymes: The Fountain of Life by D. A. Lopez, R. Michael Williams, and Klaus Miehlke (1994), 330 pp.
I haven't found any other book about the use of enzymes in Europe and Japan for the treatment of medical conditions. There are individual chapters on the enzyme treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, cancer, heart disease, herpes virus, AIDS, traumatic injury, inflammation, and aging.
It's also the only book I have seen that explains "circulating immune complexes" in detail. This book informs not only about enzymes but about the immune system and autoimmunity.
Read my full review of Enzymes: The Fountain of Life.
Raw Food
Conscious Eating by Gabriel Cousens (2000), 850 pp.
Raw food includes raw fruits and vegetables, sprouted grains and beans, nuts and seeds, fermented vegetables and dairy, dried foods, and other raw foods. Raw food is called "live food" as its enzymes and other natural properties survive untouched by cooking.
There is much nutrition information here by the founder/director of the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, such as the excellent chapters "Deficient Diet" and "The Addictive Brain." There is also a primarily spiritual defense of a raw food (or "living food") diet and information on transitioning to vegetarian and raw diets. The raw food recipes (in a large section), with some principles of preparation, are as used at the Tree of Life Center.
See this interesting book on Amazon:
Conscious Eating
The Untold Story of Milk: The History, Politics, and Science of Nature's Perfect Food: Raw Milk from Pasture-Fed Cows, 2nd ed., by Ron Schmid (2009), 491 pp.
People have been drinking raw milk for at least 30,000 years, thanks to the pastoral way of life with reindeer, goats, camels, and cows.
Raw milk contains the miraculous enzymes that are killed by pasteurization and the health-giving proteins that are warped into allergic shapes by pasteurization.
Instead of pasteurizing milk, could farms provide safe, healthy raw milk for everyone?
See my full review of The Untold Story of Milk.
Wheatgrass: Nature's Finest Medicine: The Complete Guide to Using Grasses to Revitalize Your Health, revised ed., by Steve Meyerowitz (2006), 240 pp.
Here's where I got the information and motivation to feel confident about drinking wheatgrass juice every day.
- How to buy wheatgrass juice
- Or, how to grow and juice wheatgrass
- Reviews of companies, spas, and juicers
- Personal stories
- Summaries of studies
See Wheatgrass Information on this site.
The Wheatgrass Book: How to Grow and Use Wheatgrass to Maximize Your Health and Vitality by Ann Wigmore (1985), 144 pp.
The classic from the founder of the Hippocrates Health Institute and pioneer popularizer of green, raw, and fermented health foods, including wheatgrass juice, green drinks, and Rejuvelac.
See Wheatgrass Information on this site.