Informative and educational read. A lot of the charts go a little over my head, but I imagine they'll be easier to digest when I'm using it as a reference and not an interruption from reading. The book is definitely making me be more conscious about my food choices and inspiring me to actually read Nutrition Labels before buying the same old name brand stuff. It blows my mind how little I've thought about my own nutrition over the years. Good place to start if you want a no-nonsense introduction to healthy eating and nutrition.

Everything you mother ever told you about eating right, except this person is from Harvard. Actually well written and easy to read. Makes nutrition simple for the general public to understand. A little disappointed that Girl Scout cookies still aren't a food group.

Very well written, researched and evidence-based book on nutrition and healthy eating. The authors also discuss the politics of nutrition as it relates to the USDA, and make recommendations to utilize the Harvard Medical School healthy eating plate and the Harvard healthy eating pyramid. I appreciated the recipes in the final chapter to support a diet higher in whole grains, plant oils, vegetables, fruit and legumes with moderation with dairy and red meats.

Everyone should read this book, even if it's just slowly chapter by chapter over the course of a year. Walter Willett, the author, is my hero and one of the greatest public health nutritionists ever. It may be redundant for people who already know that real food is good for you and you need to eat a variety, everything in moderation, not a lot of soda, refined grains, blah, blah which is all stuff I knew but I STILL enjoyed reading it. He has a really easy to read, entertaining writing style that lays out why things that are good for you are good for you. His food guide pyramid is the one that the USDA should be promoting instead of their current one that is inconsistent with a lot of nutrition messages. There's some good recipes in the back also.

Found the book well documented and presenting the information in a clear and structured way. I must admit that I don’t always agree with the author as of course the origin country of the reader will have an impact on his diet, but the info was super useful to increase a bit my knowledge and understanding on nutrition

Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy teaches you how to eat healthy. The Harvard professor, Walter C. Willett, sets out to bust a lot of the myths about healthy eating and shares the latest state of the research. As an ever evolving science, nutrition will probably continue to develop over time and offer new theories disproving old ones. The author concentrates on foods that help us protect our bodies from the most common diseases and emphasizes the differences between the various diet schools. Finally, the book offers numerous recipes for healthy cooking.

I would recommend this book to anybody who wishes to live a healthier life. This is not a weight-loss book or a book that offers a specific diet but rather a manual for choosing healthy foods over unhealthy ones.

What I took from this book is exactly the last toolkit - the ability to trade-off different types of foods based on their nutrition. Before even started the book, I had already starting doing some of these trade-offs and I am really happy with the results. After reading it, I only expanded my list.

Overall, I am satisfied with the information in this book. For me, food, especially healthy food, is very important. I used to not care much about what I ate, but everything changed after I realized that I wanted to feel healthy. I started with simple diets and cutting down on junk food. And recently I discovered different types of smoothies and natural juices that are a great substitute for all sodas and my favorite is https://betterme.world/articles/celer.... I really like the feeling after drinking juice and now it is in my daily routine.

If you have lots of questions about nutrition and vitamins and don’t want to feel bad about yourself this is great book. It has all the info. It explains all the misinformation. It reduces diet-info anxiety. It provides really reasonable and reassuring ways to eat well. It explains WHY all these things are good for you, which very much makes you want to eat them. Good book, 10/10, no notes. I read a newer edition than the one in the picture i think.

I wish I could give this book three and a half stars, because it isn't as middling as three stars sounds, but it's a little quaint and outdated to get four stars. It's amazing how quickly nutritional information changes from year to year.

Anyway! This book has a handful of guidelines and a re-designed food pyramid to help optimize your health, as has been shown by nutritional and epidemiological studies up to 2000. The bottom line? You should exercise, maintain a healthy weight, and eat lots of whole grains, unsaturated fats, a great variety of fruits and vegetables, and low-fat proteins. Milk, red meats, and starchy carbs (white rice, potatoes, white flour, breakfast cereal) are all optional foods that should be taken very moderately if at all. Also, moderate use of alcohol, coffee, and tea are encouraged. In short, Willett is a big fan of the Mediterranean diet along with regular exercise.

He doesn't jump on the then-bandwagon (wow, I feel old) of the "Where's Your Mustache?" US Dairy Council campaign. People in the US have really high rates of calcium consumption but also higher than average rates of osteoporosis. So. He believes that around 600mg/day is adequate, and ideally not from milk. He does support supplementation with Folic Acid, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Vitamin D (in winter and in higher latitudes), and Vitamin E.

The last hundred or so pages of the book are a bunch of recipes, from breakfast to dessert, using the types of foods he believes are most beneficial.

Not as dry as I was expecting, but worth reading to understand what nutrition information is nonsense and what is based on scientific evidence. Still, non-fiction, self help, you know what you're getting.

DNF @ 22%

This is the best book on diet I have read, simply because Dr. Willett, being the most famous nutritional epidemiologist in the world as he is, is wise enough to speak conservatively, recognize when dietary factor x does not necessarily have an effect on disease y, note that more research is needed in certain areas, and recognize the merits and drawbacks of a variety of different diets that normally separate themselves into enemy camps. He speaks truly like an intelligent researcher, not a fame-obsessed MD who believes he/she has found the secret to health that works every time, while every other researcher is too dumb to catch on.

He clearly relies a lot on longitudinal cohort studies for his conclusions, and particularly on his own longitudinal cohorts. I wonder if an independent researcher of his caliber would come to the same conclusions about coffee, wine, and other foods that he praises or criticizes.

My worst critique goes not to Dr. Willett but the awful narration job. I was so sick of hearing "co-lawn" (colon) "he-mee" (heme) "men-strew-ate" (menstruate) and at least 10 other oft-repeated, horribly botched words that seriously make me question the effort put into recording this book (of course, some pronunciations are up to debate, but others are pretty broadly accepted).