In the bookstore you will find diet and nutrition books that have been put together. I understand why – they all focus on health and eating – but there is an important distinction between them.
There are so many dimensions to consider when thinking about how eating affects our health. Food nourishes our bodies, but it also plays a role in our social life, our emotional health and our overall happiness. Nutrition books examine these things and help us to better understand how food affects us, without giving one-time advice.
Diet books, on the other hand, tend to ignore the complexity of food. They usually follow the core of identifying a problem and prescribe to the reader a clearly defined solution. There is no shortage of these books, and more is coming; Ironically, most of them claim to be the last you will ever need. (The last diet book you probably read is the last one you need, but not for the reasons the author thinks.)
Nutrition books may seem less attractive than diet books on face value – they do not promise to solve all your problems, but they are much more worthwhile. Read a few and you will never want to read a diet book again; you can put so many holes in their empty promises. Nutrition books will help you better understand how food affects your physical, mental and emotional health. From this understanding you can then determine what the best way of eating may be for you.
The following five books are a great place to start. They do not try to sell you with the supposed virtues or evils of certain foods or nutrients, nor do they suggest that you revamp your own lifestyle to imitate one from another culture, time or circumstance. (They also do not distill complicated and systemic food issues to oversimplified advice such as “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”) Instead, they will teach you why we eat the way we do and how food affects our body. Many of them do give some way how to eat, but they also talk about policy, history and the culture of diet.
1. ‘The complete guide to sports nutrition,‘by Anita Bean
There are countless sports nutrition books, but none of them are as wide and as deep as not The complete guide to sports nutrition. This is not a flashy release that describes a very specific diet of an elite athlete (ahem, TB12) or a manifesto on how (insert a fad diet here) is actually the best way to supplement. Instead, it presents the evidence-based concepts of sports nutrition in a way that is easy to understand, but not too simple. You will get a good idea to eat for performance and why different foods affect you as it is, but you will not feel obligated to redesign your diet or live and die according to a set of rules. The author Anita Bean is a well-known sports nutritionist and former competitive bodybuilder who has worked with the British Olympic Association and many professional teams in various sports. Her book is relevant to athletes of all levels.
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2. ‘The Great Starvation Experiment’ by Todd Tucker
If you’ve heard that ‘diets do not work’ but you do not know why, then start with the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. The 13-month clinical study, conducted in the 1940s, followed 36 healthy, young white men through a period of ‘semi-starvation’ and subsequent rehabilitation, which not only documented how their bodies changed but also how their mental health has deteriorated. The experiment is rightly considered inhuman by today’s standards, although the male diets have higher calories than recommended by many modern diets. (They eat about 1,570 calories a day over two meals.) The Great Hunger Experiment, historian Todd Tucker examines the study and how it affected the participants during and after.
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3. ‘Intuitive Eating’, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch
The intuitive eating approach is very popular among nutritionists today, but it is not a new framework. Dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch first published Intuitive eating in 1995 after seeing their clients repeatedly try to lose weight and improve their health with traditional diets. Their book encourages you to reconsider your own thoughts and feelings about food, diets and weight. It uses relative anecdotes, as well as a substantial and growing body of evidence to support the idea that eating without dietary rules and abandoning the pursuit of weight loss can improve your health. Even if you are convinced that intuitive eating is not something for you, the book offers a new way of thinking about nutrition that can resonate. You will gain insight into how and why food restrictions often fall back, and learn how to adapt to your own hunger and cravings.
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4. ‘Soft food’ by Rachael Hartley
Most of the messages we see about intuitive eating focus on getting rid of food rules and making peace with our weight and our body. One aspect that is central to intuitive eating, but that is not often discussed, is what the original is. Intuitive eating authors call ‘soft nutrition’. In essence, it’s about using evidence-based principles for healthy eating in a flexible and individualized way. Dietitian Rachael Hartley borrows the phrase and expands on the concept in her book of the same name. In Soft food, she guides readers through the basics of nutrition without painting any way of eating as right or wrong. Hartley’s approach is rooted in the Health at Every Size framework, which involves everything to encourage healthy behavior and provide health care to people of all body sizes, without indicating weight loss or assuming that someone’s health is determined by their weight. The book is a useful and empathetic guide to nutrition, and it is an excellent alternative to conventional nutrition books for anyone who feels like they call weight and weight loss.
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5. ‘Tasty truth’ by Marion Nestle
My recommendation from Marion Nestle Unpalatable truth comes with some releases. While this is a striking look at how the food industry is influencing policy and nutrition research, I warn you not to panic about this as much as the book might encourage you to. It is unreasonable to think that food businesses should not be involved in shaping the policies that affect them so directly, and not all industry-funded research is inherently wrong or bad. (Sometimes the only viable way to fund a study is to take money into the industry.) Moreover, the modern food industry is not the pure evil that it regularly constitutes; it is because of this food industry that you can easily buy all the food you need.
That said, large food businesses and lobbyists regularly exceed their limits. Unpalatable truth will teach you to think more critically about any nutritional information you encounter, and it provides insight into how often evidence is misrepresented or taken out of context. For me, an indirect pick up of the book was that it is really up to you to choose how you should eat. Many headlines about ‘superfoods’ or very rigid diets are, in fact, sponsored by companies that have a fixed interest in getting you to buy. It is best to ignore it and stick to eating a flexible and varied diet filled with many nutritious foods.
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