Book Reviews

I've recently read 3 really great books on eating healthfully and I wanted to share them with my readers.  As I've stated before, I am an info junkie.  These are non-fiction, clearly, and interesting!  I got them all from the library (minimalist me only keeps cookbooks!), so they are readily available to pretty much anyone with access to a library.

Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss

Michael Moss is the man that first started all of the talk about the pink slime meat being sold in schools, fast food restaurants and supermarkets.  This book doesn't advocate a plant based whold foods diet but it does advocate being aware.  He breaks the book up into three sections, addressing how food processors and distributors use these three ingredients to entice us, hook us and keep us coming back for more.  In his investigative reporting he talks with heavy hitters in all sections of the industry.  He goes to labs that try to determine the WHY we have these attractions, the food scientists that manipulate the ingredients to figure out HOW to put them in foods and then marketers and CEOs that have to package all of these products so they are WHAT we buy.  What was really interesting is that I see a lot of issues with class.  Most of these white collared educated scientists, CEOs, and marketers do NOT eat the foods they sell.  They eat clean and work out.  This really bothered me.  It is well known that poor communities have a lack of places to get fresh food.  In addition, he likens the chemical and psychological reactions we have to these ingredients in these foods to nicotine addiction in cigarettes.  This makes sense since for a long time Phillip Morris (Marlboro) owned both General Foods and Kraft.  It also makes me think that we need more education about food to overcome the obesity epidemic as well as the healthcare crisis which I believe is mostly caused by people living unhealthy lives and looking for drugs and medicines rather than lifestyle changes.  In the end, while he does place heavy blame on the industry for creating addicting products that manipulate and abuse our natural instincts, Moss says that in the end we have a choice and that if we want things to change and we want to see better products and ingredients, then we need to vote with our dollars.  I whole heartedly agree.

The Starch Solution by John McDougall, MD   

I am a big fan of Dr. McDougall.  He is in the documentary Forks over Knives (which I HIGHLY recommend watching...it is free streaming on Netflix and Amazon, by the way).  He graduated from MSU (for the State fans out there) and is a part of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.  In this book he explains how starches (beans, rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, pasta, etc) are NOT bad for us but rather what we do to them.  Baked potatoes are extremely healthy....until they are lathered in sour cream and butter.  These products are high in fiber, low in dietary fat, keep us fuller longer and give us most of the nutrients we need.  In the back he has several recipes which I plan to try next week.  I already kind of knew this information but it was nice to read the information on why and see studies he cited.  One MSU study had men eat what they normally do just adding in extra starches in carbs...huge amounts of bread actually.  These men lost weight, tons of it.  No shame in eating these foods, just don't eat french fries...eat a baked potato with steam broccoli and avocado...yum!

Mindless Eating by Brian Wansick

Like Salt Sugar Fat, this book doesn't advocate a plant based whold foods diet either but I still learned a lot.  Wansick is a professor that studies food psychology and our behaviors surrounding food.  I was extremely impressed with how so many of our food habits are dictated by things in our head and environment.  Things we THINK we have control over and THINK we are conscious of but really aren't.  He touches on the impact of plates/bowls/cups/silverware, the atmosphere where we are eating, the people we are eating with, the health perception of the food, the words used to describe the food, etc.  It really has made me think twice about the way I eat.  Especially the section related to food scripts.  He says that we have engrained in us times where we always eat, so we always do.  Like watching TV, at meetings, etc.  I am definitely guilty of this.  Also, he says that if we can see how much we have ate, we stop.  But foods that don't have evidence, we will over eat with.  This is really true.  I was eating cherries with Jack last night and notice we had so many pits.  So, I stopped before we demolished the box.  Blueberries however do not show that evidence.  All of his research was done in experiments on real, unsuspecting people.  It was a fun read learning how humans behave.  I definitely have become more mindful of my eating since then but I still have a long way to go.


In the end I definitely recommend all of these books.  On my list to read now are Whole by T. Colin Campbell, and The Pleasure Trap by Douglas Lisle.