Outside Magazine - 5 Books About Food That Everyone Should Read
At the bookstore, you’ll find diet and nutrition books lumped together. I get why—they’re all focused on health and eating—but there’s an important distinction between them.
There are so many dimensions to consider when you think about how eating influences our health. Food nourishes our bodies, but it also plays a role in our social lives, our emotional health, and our overall happiness. Nutrition books explore these things and help us better understand how food affects us, without giving one-size-fits-all advice.
Diet books, on the other hand, tend to ignore the complexities of food. They typically follow the trope of identifying a problem and prescribing the reader a clearly defined solution. There’s no shortage of these books out there, and more just keep on coming; ironically, most of them claim to be the last one you’ll ever need. (The last diet book you read probably is the last one you need, but not for the reasons the author may think.)
Nutrition books may seem less appealing than diet books at face value—they don’t promise to solve all your problems—but they’re far more worthwhile. Read a few and you’ll never want to read a diet book again, you’ll be able to poke so many holes in their empty promises. Nutrition books will give you a better grasp of how food affects your physical, mental, and emotional health. From that understanding, you can then determine what the best way of eating might be for you.
The following five books are a great place to start. They don’t try to sell you on the supposed virtues or evils of certain foods or nutrients, nor do they suggest that you overhaul your own lifestyle to mimic one from another culture, time, or circumstance. (They also don’t distill complex and systemic food issues down to oversimplified advice like “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”) Instead they’ll teach you why we eat the way we do and how food affects our bodies. Many of them do give some form of how-to-eat advice, but they also talk about policy, history, and the culture of dieting.