Healthy Eating Books

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.

Traditional Real Food

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.)

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 fairly complex.

Read my entire review of Nourishing Traditions.

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!

Asian Real Food Traditions

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.

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.

Raw And Living Food

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 entire review of Enzyme Nutrition.

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.