More-or-less the Mediterranean diet, complete with the science behind why it's healthy for you. The recipes look pretty tasty.

Choosing the right healthy diet is confusing. We are surrounded by massive amount of information, misinformation and disinformation — and its difficult to tell which is which.

However, there are certain standards that help identify quality of the studies: large number of participants, them being followed over time, confirmation by other studies, systematic reviews, publication in top-tier journal, etc. That is exactly what the book provides — unbiased data of large and widely confirmed studies (few small ones too, for a wider perspective).

This is the diet book I decided to trust — the suggested guidelines are absolutely sustainable for a long term and explained in a simple manner (I learned so much!). Ideal for those who want to live healthy without overcomplicating their lives. Recommend.

This was a dense book to get through but had a lot of useful information. I am one of those people who is in the healthy weight range who will put on a few pounds every year within that BMI and will lose it and then the cycle starts over the next year. And every year, I try to find that balance of exercise and eating well but I cannot maintain it for the whole year, hence the cycle. I liked how this author pointed out that the healthy BMI range is vast. I had tried the low carb way of eating last year and it was successful but I had felt deprived and it didn’t feel right to avoid whole grains. It did help me reduce added sugar in my diet though and I have kept it which surprised me. I don’t actually like sugar in my coffee and tea anymore. Which this book supports as well.

There isn’t anything new in this book but I liked how detailed he got with what vitamins we need in our diet and how he supports everything he chose to say with research based evidence. I don’t know if I agree with everything in this book though. I feel that most nutrition experts leave out info that doesn’t go with their point. I do not want to only eat produce, whole grains, chicken, soy and fish. He didn’t convince me that eating other protein or butter is bad for you if you do it sensibly. But this book has made me cook more vegetarian meals and be more mindful about what I’m eating. I had borrowed this book but now I’ve bought my own copy so I can refer back to it. The recipes aren’t that useful to me but I will see if they give me ideas for new flavor combinations.

EDIT: After reading "The Big Fat Surprise", I no longer recommend this book. Will leave my original review and lower from 4 stars to 1 star. I consider literature that promotes eating of mainly grains and in this case even plant oils, and less meat and animal fats to be extremely dangerous.

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Very good book. As long as I don't find any better resource on healthy dieting, I'll shelf this under "Everyone should read this".

I am very lucky to have grown up in a household with a "stay-home-mum" who took her job very very seriously and has obsessed over nutritional facts for most of her life (of course, back in the days we didn't have that much data from reliable research), so my diet has probably always been very good and varied and everyone in my family is very slim and healthy.

I am also a complete moron to never have taken more interest in the topic. As usual, school education completely and utterly failed to prepare us for this rather essential part of real life (and hence, we have an epidemic of obese people in the world now), and that's exactly where this books steps in:

It's a rather tough read. They said in the foreword that one of the co-authors specifically had the job to translate the science-speak into normal people speak - and they very much succeeded with that in my opinion - but I think for most people, this book will still be too much to swallow.

It is a bit strangely structured, and there is *a lot* of repetition going on but I think that is good. From just my first read, without taking notes or "sitting down to learn my vocabulary", I have now some fresh new knowledge burnt into my brain that I can use in every day conversations and decisions. I wish the index would also show sub-sub-chapters. One time I wanted to find something about cholesterol again and I couldn't so I had to skim through the whole book.

Just from my first read I have identified some bad habits of mine that I can immediately stop eating and replace with healthier alternatives (i.e. drink less milk, don't eat so many magnesium supplements, eat more nuts and beans - I always thought those were junk foods).

I will have to re-read parts of the book many many times in order to come up with even more good habits and identify good eating places around my office and, of course, get into a routine of stuffing my fridge with good ingredients to be able to cook healthy meals.

Having a tonne of recipes at the end of the book (at the 70% mark) definitely helps.

One small note of warning: The book is *heavily* targeted at an American audience. I'm living in Asia. I'll have a hard time getting my hands on most of the ingredients they suggested in their recipes (it's possible, but insanely expensive).

All in all, if your home-library doesn't contain any books on healthy eating, stop what you are doing right now and buy this book!!