Eat Drink and Be Healthy, by Walter Millet

Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating is an ambitious book, aiming to change the dietary habits of western people. It takes apart the healthy food pyramid we are taught as children and shows how much the we hold as sacred truth is at the root of health problems spreading through our society. Like any self improvement book we are given a new model, for example instead of "all fats are bad" we are shown how and why mono-unsaturated fats such as those found in a Mediterranean diet fats is essential to our ongoing health.

The book goes into a similar level of detail for carbohydrates, vitamins, protein... any aspect of our diet which can be analyzed gets examined. As someone who's never really broken down what I eat past "try not to have too many french fries" it was interesting to learn how each food and mineral benefits or potentially harms me.

The ultimate aim of this book is to replace our unhealthy diets with a new model and there are several recipes included to help get you started. The few we tried out were pretty good, but if you're not quite ready to replace prime rib with pine nuts, there are still some low hanging fruit you can mix into your diet with little or no extra effort. For example we replaced regular rice with and pasta with whole grain "brown equivalents. Not only does the end result taste better, the old "post heavy carb lunch" energy drops have vanished. Easy wins like this make it worth reading this book alone.

A key indicator that the ideas in a book are valuable is when other causes and authors pick adapt them and create their own movements. The recent popularity surge of the "slow carb diet" led by lifestyle guru Tim Ferris in The Four Hour Body has it's roots in Eat Drink and Be Healthy.

I recommend giving this book a try. 8/10.