29 Best Diet & Nutrition Books

Twelve-time New York Times bestselling author Mark Hyman, MD, presents his unique Pegan diet–including meal plans, recipes, and shopping lists.

For decades, the diet wars have pitted advocates for the low-carb, high-fat paleo diet against advocates of the exclusively plant-based vegan diet and dozens of other diets leaving most of us bewildered and confused. For those of us on the sidelines, trying to figure out which approach is best has been nearly impossible–both extreme diets have unique benefits and drawbacks. But how can it be, we’ve asked desperately, that our only options are bacon and butter three times a day or endless kale salads? How do we eat to reverse disease, optimal health, longevity and performance. How do we eat to reverse climate change? There must be a better way!

Fortunately, there is. With The Pegan Diet‘s food-is-medicine approach, Mark Hyman explains how to take the best aspects of the paleo diet (good fats, limited refined carbs, limited sugar) and combine them with the vegan diet (lots and lots of fresh, healthy veggies) to create a delicious diet that is not only good for your brain and your body, but also good for the planet.

Featuring thirty recipes and plenty of infographics illustrating the concepts, The Pegan Diet offers a balanced and easy-to-follow approach to eating that will help you get, and stay, fit, healthy, focused, and happy–for life.

The go-to resource–now fully revised and updated–for building a healthy body image and making peace with food, once and for all.

When it was first published, Intuitive Eating was revolutionary in its anti-dieting approach. The authors, both prominent health professionals in the field of nutrition and eating disorders, urge listners to embrace the goal of developing body positivity and reconnecting with one’s internal wisdom about eating–to unlearn everything they were taught about calorie-counting and other aspects of diet culture and to learn about the harm of weight stigma. Today, their message is more relevant and pressing than ever. With this updated edition of the classic bestseller, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch teach listeners how to:

– Follow the ten principles of Intuitive Eating to achieve a new and trusting relationship with food

– Fight against diet culture and reject diet mentality forever

– Find satisfaction in their food choices

– Exercise kindness toward their feelings, their bodies, and themselves

– Prevent or heal the wounds of an eating disorder

– Respect their bodies and make peace with food–at any age, weight, or stage of development

– Follow body positive feeds for inspiration and validation

… and more easy-to-follow suggestions that can lead listeners to integrate Intuitive Eating into their everyday lives and feel the freedom that comes with trusting their inner wisdom–for life.

USA TODAY BESTSELLER * WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * INSTANT INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

Improve all areas of your health–your sleep, cravings, mood, energy, skin, weight–and even slow down aging with easy, science-based hacks to manage your blood sugar while still eating the foods you love.

Glucose, or blood sugar, is a tiny molecule in our body that has a huge impact on our health. It enters our bloodstream through the starchy or sweet foods we eat. Ninety percent of us suffer from too much glucose in our system–and most of us don’t know it.

The symptoms? Cravings, fatigue, infertility, hormonal issues, acne, wrinkles… And over time, the development of conditions like type 2 diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome, cancer, dementia, and heart disease.

Drawing on cutting-edge science and her own pioneering research, biochemist Jessie Inchauspe offers ten simple, surprising hacks to help you balance your glucose levels and reverse your symptoms–without going on a diet or giving up the foods you love. For example:
* How eating foods in the right order will make you lose weight effortlessly
* What secret ingredient will allow you to eat dessert and still go into fat-burning mode
* What small change to your breakfast will unlock energy and cut your cravings

Both entertaining, informative, and packed with the latest scientific data, this book presents a new way to think about better health. Glucose Revolution is chock-full of tips that can drastically and immediately improve your life, whatever your dietary preferences.

Discover the many benefits to the ketogenic diet beyond weight loss–including reduced anxiety, minimized depression, and even a reduction or elimination of prescription medications.

In Weight-Loss Hero, wildly popular health coach Christine Carter shares her story of leaving behind roller-coaster dieting and losing more than 150 pounds by first changing the way she thought about weight and her own worth. By teaching us how to nourish our minds so we can properly nourish our bodies, Christine provides a sustainable path to a fully integrated healthy low-carb lifestyle.

Christine uses her personal stories of overcoming failure to encourage us as only the best coaches can. With almost 300,000 Instagram followers and features in Shape, Fitness, Popsugar.com, and TODAY.com, Christine already has enthusiastic fans around the world. As she reminds us, when it comes to healthy living, weight loss doesn’t begin with a new diet or exercise plan. It begins in the mind.¬†

In the audiobook companion PDF download, you can find:

• More than 50 original recipes with photos
• Inspiring workout tips
• Practical ways to incorporate a healthy keto diet into your life
• Keto-friendly grocery lists
• Recommended keto-friendly meals at popular restaurants

A step-by-step guide to Ayurvedic dietary resets to gently cleanse your digestive system and reboot your body and mind

* Presents easy-to-follow instructions for a full 6- or 8-week Ayurvedic rest diet, as well as a simplified 1-week plan, detailing what to eat and drink day by day

* Includes recipes, mindful eating tips, and meal prepping techniques

* Explains the healing science of Ayurveda, the rejuvenating benefits of fasting and mono-diets, and how to maximize nutrient absorption with food combining

Food sensitivities, chronic inflammation, obesity, and chronic disease are on the rise. Could our modern diets and mindless eating habits be to blame? How do you reboot your system–body, mind, and spirit–and start the path to radiant health?

In this easy-to-follow guide to Ayurvedic dietary resets, Vatsala Sperling, Ph.D., details how to rest and gently cleanse your digestive system, lose extra pounds, and reboot your body and mind with the Ayurvedic techniques of fasting, mono-diets, and food combining. She begins by sharing a simplified introduction to the healing science of Ayurveda from India and explains the spiritual, mindful relationship to food at its heart. Offering step-by-step instructions for a full 6- or 8-week Ayurvedic reset diet, as well as a simplified 1-week program, she details, day by day, what to eat and drink and provides recipes and meal prepping tips and techniques.

The author explains how to prepare for fasting and the benefits of giving your digestive system a break from food, even if only for one day. She prepares you for mono-dieting–when you eat one type of food such as fruits or vegetables for a set period–and reveals the rejuvenating effects that come from isolating your daily diet to one food type. The author then explores the Ayurvedic techniques of food combining in detail, explaining exactly what to eat when to maximize nutrient absorption.

Based on the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda, this guide provides everything you need to know to heal your digestive system, prevent chronic ailments, find your healthy weight, and rebuild your sacred relationship with food.

Help your child eat normally again.

Parents are the first to know when their child starts behaving differently. Has your son stopped eating his favorite food, or does he refuse to eat out with friends? Has your daughter drastically increased her exercise regimen or become obsessed with health foods? These are among the telltale signs that your child, like millions of others, may have an eating disorder (ED).

In this essential guide, registered dietitians Casey Crosbie and Wendy Sterling introduce an all-new strategy you can use to help your child at home. The plate-by-plate approach is rooted in family-based treatment–the leading psychological therapy for EDs. Unlike complicated “exchange” systems, this is simple: Crosbie and Sterling coach you through every aspect of meeting your child’s nutritional needs, using just one tool–a ten-inch plate.

Paired with therapy, this intuitive, visual method is the best way to support your child on the path to recovery. Plus, the authors cover how to talk about diet and weight, what to do while traveling, what to expect from your child’s doctor, and much more.

Readily find your way to better health with this guide to nutritional supplements and holistic health

Health-conscious consumers read nutritional labels, but it’s nearly impossible to get the nutrients we need with diet alone. To get the USDA-recommended daily quota of vitamin D, for example, you need to eat 15 eggs or 26 sardines; of iron, 414 almonds or 15 cups of broccoli. So we rely on nutritional supplements–vitamins and minerals, probiotics and enzymes–but the variety of pills, products, and elixirs on the market today is overwhelming. And, as we have seen in recent news, some of these products are downright fakes. Trusted natural health physician and bestselling author Tieraona Low Dog, MD, provides a personalized approach to using nutritional supplements for your specific health needs, helping you navigate the complex and often confusing landscape of vitamins, minerals, and more.

Dr. Low Dog explains the basics about every essential nutritional supplement and guides the listener in creating a personalized supplement plan, tailored to individual genetics, age, gender, and lifestyle. Low Dog evaluates current research, explains the relationship between food and supplements, describes how medications cause chemical imbalances in the body, and advises on how to judge brands and read labels.

Low Dog engages and encourages listeners to take charge of their own health and provides guidance to finding the right combination of nutritional supplements to improve mood, strength, energy, and overall well-being.

You can finally lose weight–and keep it off–without sacrificing the foods you love with Ilana Muhlstein’s tried and tested 2B Mindset weight loss program perfect for all shapes and sizes!

My name is Ilana Muhlstein and I wrote You Can Drop It! to help you learn my personal and proven system to drop weight and keep it off–without sacrifice–and it’s so simple that you’ll love it! This unique approach has become famous thanks to my renowned 2B Mindset program. The 2B Mindset is designed with the built-in ability for customization so that it is optimally effective and can work for everyone. It has already helped thousands of people lose weight–some more than 100 pounds–while never asking them to go hungry or cut out the foods that they love.

You Can Drop It! doesn’t just give you the key knowledge you need to lose weight. It adds motivational principles and real-life examples and it’s the perfect complement to my successful program.

No counting calories!

No portion control!

No feeling hungry!

No off-limits foods!

No exercise required!

Finally–weight loss with FREEDOM!

The missing piece to the most sought-after health goal, How to Lose Weight for the Last Time offers brain-based solutions for dropping pounds and keeping them off without suffering or sacrifice.

As a pediatrician, Katrina Ubell, MD, always struggled with her weight–she was either 40 pounds overweight, or struggling to lose that weight. Although she’d regularly counsel parents on the importance of keeping their kids healthy and fostering good eating habits, Dr. Ubell, as a busy professional, was never able to do the same for herself. Like everyone else, she tried many different diets and programs, but would always regain the weight.

In 2015, Dr. Ubell “cracked the code” for making weight loss permanent, and developed a program targeted at busy physicians like herself who often de-prioritize their own wellness. As a weight loss coach, Dr. Ubell has helped over 1,000 busy physicians and professionals find and stay at a healthy weight with her brain-based program, and is now ready to bring this program to the general public.

Dr. Ubell’s program doesn’t involve any unrealistic diets, plans, special foods, supplements, or even rigorous exercise protocols; instead, she uses a deep understanding of the brain and behavior patterns to get results. Through her work, she has been able to uncover and speak into the universal obstacles that stand in our way of losing and keeping off weight.

A New Scientist Best Book of 2020

Our evolutionary ancestors once possessed the ability to intuit what food their bodies needed, in what proportions, and ate the right things in the proper amounts—perfect nutritional harmony. From wild baboons to gooey slime molds, most every living organism instinctually knows how to balance their diets, except modern-day humans. When and why did we lose this ability, and how can we get it back?

David Raubenheimer and Stephen Simpson reveal the answers to these questions in a gripping tale of evolutionary biology and nutritional science, based upon years of groundbreaking research. Their colorful scientific journey takes readers across the globe, from the foothills of Cape Town, to the deserts of Arizona, to a state-of-the-art research center in Sydney. Readers will encounter locusts, mice and even gorillas along the way as the scientists test their hypotheses on various members of the animal kingdom.

This epic scientific adventure culminates in a unifying theory of nutrition that has profound implications for our current epidemic of metabolic diseases and obesity. Raubenheimer and Simpson ultimately offer useful advice to understand the unwanted side effects of fad diets, gain control over one’s food environment, and see that delicious and healthy are integral parts of proper eating.

The instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller!

Change when you eat and change your body, your health, and your life!

Diets don’t work. You know you know that, and yet you continue to try them, because what else can you do? You can Fast. Feast. Repeat. After losing over eighty pounds and keeping every one of them off, Gin Stephens started a vibrant, successful online community with hundreds of thousands of members from around the world who have learned the magic of a Delay, Don’t Deny(r) intermittent fasting lifestyle.

Fast. Feast. Repeat. has it all! You’ll learn how to work a variety of intermittent fasting approaches into your life, no matter what your circumstances or schedule. Once you’ve ignited your fat-burning superpower, you’ll get rid of “diet brain” forever, tweak your protocol until it’s second nature, and learn why IF is a lifestyle, not a diet.

Fast. Feast. Repeat. is for everyone! Beginners will utilize the 28-Day FAST Start. Experienced intermittent fasters will strengthen their intermittent fasting practice, work on their mindset, and hear about the latest research out of top universities supporting intermittent fasting as the health plan with a side effect of weight loss. Still have questions? Gin has you covered! All of the most frequently asked intermittent fasting questions are answered in the exhaustive FAQ section.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Griffin

We’re told that if we care about our health–or our planet–eliminating red meat from our diets is crucial. That beef is bad for us and cattle farming is horrible for the environment. But science says otherwise.

Beef is framed as the most environmentally destructive and least healthy of meats. We’re often told that the only solution is to reduce or quit red meat entirely. But despite what anti-meat groups, vegan celebrities, and some health experts say, plant-based agriculture is far from a perfect solution. In Sacred Cow, registered dietitian Diana Rodgers and former research biochemist and New York Times bestselling author Robb Wolf explore the quandaries we face in raising and eating animals–focusing on the largest (and most maligned) of farmed animals, the cow.

Taking a critical look at the assumptions and misinformation about meat, Sacred Cow points out the flaws in our current food system and in the proposed “solutions.” Inside, Rodgers and Wolf reveal contrarian but science-based findings, such as

Meat and animal fat are essential for our bodies.A sustainable food system cannot exist without animals.A vegan diet may destroy more life than sustainable cattle farming.Regenerative cattle ranching is one of our best tools at mitigating climate change.

You’ll also find practical guidance on how to support sustainable farms and a thirty-day challenge to help you transition to a healthful and conscientious diet. With scientific rigor, deep compassion, and wit, Rodgers and Wolf argue unequivocally that meat (done right) should have a place on the table.

It’s not the cow, it’s the how!

This audiobook is read by the author.

Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s pathbreaking tour of the world’s vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these–rice, wheat, and corn–now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still:

The source of much of the world’s food–seeds–is mostly in the control of just four corporations. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow. Half of all the world’s cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company. And one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer.

If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same wherever you are in the world, you’re by no means alone. This matters: when we lose diversity and foods become endangered, we not only risk the loss of traditional foodways, but also of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our food has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. Our food monoculture is a threat to our health–and to the planet.

In Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods before it’s too late. He tells the fascinating stories of the people who continue to cultivate, forage, hunt, cook, and consume what the rest of us have forgotten or didn’t even know existed. Take honey–not the familiar product sold in plastic bottles, but the wild honey gathered by the Hadza people of East Africa, whose diet consists of eight hundred different plants and animals and who communicate with birds in order to locate bees’ nests. Or consider murnong–once the staple food of Aboriginal Australians, this small root vegetable with the sweet taste of coconut is undergoing a revival after nearly being driven to extinction. And in Sierra Leone, there are just a few surviving stenophylla trees, a plant species now considered crucial to the future of coffee.

From an Indigenous American chef refining precolonial recipes to farmers tending Geechee red peas on the Sea Islands of Georgia, the individuals profiled in Eating to Extinction are essential guides to treasured foods that have endured in the face of rampant sameness and standardization. They also provide a roadmap to a food system that is healthier, more robust, and, above all, richer in flavor and meaning.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A smart, energizing program to help you shed fat, build muscle, and achieve your ideal body in just thirty days!

A huge success as a self-published e-book, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is the bible of fat loss that will help anyone to get his or her dream body. Tom Venuto has created a program using the secrets of the world’s leanest people, although it’s not about getting ripped; it is about maximizing your fat loss through nutrient timing and strategic exercise. This totally revised and 25 percent-new book includes a never-before-shared plan that will make it even easier for everyone to achieve amazing results.

A New York Times bestsellerNamed one of The Economist’s Books of the Year 2014Named one of The Wall Street Journal’s Top Ten Best Nonfiction Books of 2014Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014Forbes’s Most Memorable Healthcare Book of 2014In The Big Fat Surprise, investigative journalist Nina Teicholz reveals the unthinkable: that everything we thought we knew about dietary fat is wrong. She documents how the low-fat nutrition advice of the past sixty years has amounted to a vast uncontrolled experiment on the entire population, with disastrous consequences for our health. Dish up the red meat, eggs, and whole milk!

For decades, Americans have cut back on red meat and dairy products full of “bad” saturated fats. We obediently complied with nutritional guidelines to eat “heart healthy” fats found in olive oil, fish, and nuts, and followed a Mediterranean diet heavy on fruits, vegetables, and grains. Yet the nation’s health has declined. What is going on?

In The Big Fat Surprise, Teicholz reveals how sixty years of nutrition science has gotten it so wrong: how overzealous researchers have made basic scientific mistakes that, through a mix of ego and bias, allow dangerous misrepresentations to become dogma, and how scientists who dared oppose this consensus have been ostracized. For eight years, Teicholz has pored over the massive research literature and interviewed hundreds of leading experts to unravel the shockingly distorted claims of nutrition studies. She brings these researchers to life and shows how their ambitions, loyalties, and rivalries have undermined a field of research already full of difficult pitfalls.

With a lively narrative style akin to Michael Pollan’s in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the scientific rigor of Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories, Teicholz convincingly upends the conventional wisdom about all fats. Her groundbreaking claim is that more dietary fat leads to better health, wellness, and fitness. Science shows that reducing the saturated fat in our diets has been disastrous for our health as a nation, and we can, guilt-free, welcome these “whole fats” back into our lives.

Entrepreneur Jesse Itzler chronicles his month of living and extreme fitness training with a Navy SEAL in the New York Times and #1 LA Times bestseller Living With a Seal, now with two bonus chapters.

Entrepreneur Jesse Itzler will try almost anything. His life is about being bold and risky. So when Jesse felt himself drifting on autopilot, he hired a rather unconventional trainer to live with him for a month-an accomplished Navy SEAL widely considered to be “the toughest man on the planet”!

Living With a Seal is like a buddy movie if it starred the Fresh Prince of Bel- Air. . .and Rambo. Jesse is about as easy-going as you can get. SEAL is. . . not. Jesse and SEAL’s escapades soon produce a great friendship, and Jesse gains much more than muscle. At turns hilarious and inspiring, Living With a Seal ultimately shows you the benefits of stepping out of your comfort zone.

When Dr. Ray Strand found himself in a losing battle, unable to successfully treat his wife who had suffered chronically with pain and fatigue, he agreed to try the regimen of nutritional supplements that a neighbor suggested. Much to his surprise, his wife’s condition began to improve almost immediately. That amazing turn of events led him to dedicate himself to researching alternative therapies in medicine, particularly in the arena of nutritional supplements.

Dr. Strand’s illumination of the body’s silent enemy-oxidative stress-will astound you. But, more importantly, his research will equip you to protect or reclaim your nutritional health, possibly reversing disease and preventing illness.

Accompanying images, figures, and tables are available in the audiobook companion PDF download.