An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Benjamin Franklin
Food
Fat Flush Plan
How to improve your body's ability to detox toxic chemicals
Most people buy this book to lose weight, but I'm recommending it because it's all about how to take care of your liver--the primary organ that eliminates toxic chemicals from your body. This book offers a complete program for detoxing your liver and supporting it as it processes the toxic chemicals you are exposed to every day. There are also some companion books: Fat Flush Foods, Fat Flush for Life, and Fat Flush Cookbook.
The Body Restoration Plan
Exposure to toxic chemicals can make you fat
Dr. Paula Baillie-Hamilton is a medical doctor with an academic doctorate in human metabolism from the University of Oxford. One evening she was reading the newspaper and an article on the powerful hormone-damaging actions of pesticides caught her eye. What really grabbed her attention was that the small amount of chemicals needed to wreak such havoc with our sex hormones was not too different from the small amount of toxic chemicals the average person is exposed to every day. The thought came to her that if these chemicals had the power to alter our hormones so drastically, then they must also have some sort of influence on our weight. She ran for one of her biggest medical textbooks and found what she was looking for: “Changes in sex hormones can cause weight gain.” And pesticides damage sex hormones. This book explains all about how toxic chemicals hinder your body's ability to lose weight and what to do to restore your body's natural ability to maintain normal weight.
Sugar Shock!
A comprehensive, up-to-date look at how sugars and simple carbs are TOXIC to your body--including most natural sweeteners.
"Sugar Shock" is the authors' term for what happens to the body when you eat sugar. It shows how sugar and simple carbs can cause many symptoms and illnesses--including emotional and behavior problems, memory loss, hypoglycemia, cancer, aging, heart disease, skin problems, diabetes, obesity, and even destroy your love life. The book is primarily focused on the problems, but offers a final chapter that recommends basically a low-carb diet of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and proteins.
Super Size Me (DVD)
I haven't eaten fast food for over twenty years. My instincts were proven right after I watched this film.
Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's food for an entire month (for 30 days he can't eat or drink anything that isn't on McDonald's menu; he must eat three square meals a day; he must consume everything on the menu at least once and supersize his meal if asked). I don't want to ruin the suspense for you, but near the end, the doctors monitoring this experiment were shaking their heads in disbelief at his physical and emotional condition, and begging Morgan to quit the diet or suffer grave consequences. This film shows exactly why we need to eat natural, whole, organic foods.
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
The original book that documented how our health has declined as a result of our modern industrialized diet.
Traveling the world in the 1920s and '30s, Dr. Price and his wife found that "primitive" populations who ate their traditional nature-based diets enjoyed good health and vigor, while those that turned to the "civilized" diet of processed, sugar-laden foods soon developed a variety of physical problems which worsened with each generation. He found not only illness, but misshapen bones and teeth--lack of nutrition caused deformed bodies. This is his original account of his findings and conclusions, complete with pictures. A fascinating book!
Fresh Choices
A guide to choosing the best from foods that are really available.
Ideally, we would all like to eat 100% organic, but currently our food supply doesn't always give us that choice. Much more than a recipe book, Fresh Choices tells how and why to choose the best organic foods and then identifies which foods are the most and least contaminated to help you make food choices when organic isn't available. Then it shows how to turn these healthy foods into delicious dishes your family will love. Also contains advice for school lunch programs. The only drawback: dessert recipes include sugar and sweeteners are not addressed, but the rest of the information is great.
A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives
A listing of thousands of additives commonly used in processed packaged foods.
Gives the origin material of each additive, why it is used, what food products it is found in, and potential health effects or benefits. Language is easy to understand.
French Women Don't Get Fat
This book is more about how we eat, rather than what we eat.
The author, a French woman herself, contrasts how Americans and the French think about food and have different styles of eating. With wit and style, she reveals the secrets of eating she learned as a young French woman, which have helped her keep her figure while still enjoying all the pleasures of the table. Contains simple, wholesome recipes for seasonal dishes. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, completely agreed with it's wisdom, and wished my mother had taught me what I learned from this book years ago.
The Whole Soy Story
The shocking truth about how soy foods hurt our health instead of helping it.
Shocking is not too strong a word for this well-documented book. It tells how each modern soyfood is dramatically different from the traditional use of soy in Asia and how modern processed soy foods cause havoc with our health. Then whole chapters are devoted to how soy is linked to many common health problems, including thyroid disfunction, malnutrition, digestive problems, cognitive decline, reproductive disorders, immune system breakdown, heart disease, cancer, hormone disruption, and more. Full of studies and personal stories, this book is essential reading in our soy-filled world.
Nourishing Traditions
A cookbook based on preparation of whole, nourishing, pre-industrial, traditional foods.
It cuts through all the modern hype about what is healthy and gets down to looking at what healthy, long-lived people ate, as well as scientific studies. It encourages you to put together your own diet based on your ethnic heritage, your constitution, your age, your occupation, the climate in which you live, and your specific food sensitivities and allergies. It gets down to the basics of health and including a balance of protein, fats, and carbohydrates, eaten in whole, healthy forms. While the foods are traditional, recipes are geared to modern tastes and are delicious. I learn more and more from this book every time I open it. For me, this is the basic primer for healthy eating today.
