Having better health and a better body doesn’t always come down to counting calories and exercising. Your body is unique in so many ways. That’s why there isn’t a one-size-fits-all method for being fit, healthy, and active. Instead, the nutritional world has thousands of books on health to inspire people to live a healthy life. Many of these books encourage others to pick up various habits to improve your quality of life.
With that in mind, we’ve compiled a short list of books on health that question traditional ways of thinking and introduce something new to veterans and beginners alike.
1. Best Book on Health for General Health
The first book on our list is How to Be Well by Dr. Frank Lipman. In this book, he shares 6 core aspects of living a happy and healthier life. From there, he explains in clear and actionable advice on how you can improve and strengthen yourself every day.
If you’ve been in the nutritional world for a while, the book will cover nutritional practices as you’d expect. However, this book extends beyond those sciences and covers other areas, too. You’ll find advice on better sleeping, moving, everyday toxins, stress management, and even finding a sense of meaning.
From those 6 core aspects, the guide offers over 100 simple steps to improve those categories overall. Best of all, these changes aren’t massive. The guide is meant to be fun, simple, and easy to implement.
It’s suggested that you try not to read the entire thing in one sitting. The goal of this book is that you read a little and implement what you’ve read before going back to reading more.
2. Greatest Book on Supplement Use
Another aspect of better health that many have gone through is supplements. Supplements are a nice way of covering specific vitamins that your current diet is lacking in. However, you don’t want to be walking into a pharmacy and picking up every kind of vitamin. There are dozens of them and some may not provide much benefit to you.
This is where this book comes in—Fortify Your Life. In it, you’ll meet the integrative health physician Tieraona Low Dog, M.D. who will walk you through the supplement world. You’ll learn about key vitamins and minerals, reading product labels, and bring up common nutrient deficiencies you may be experiencing right now.
Dr. Low keeps a level head throughout the entire book, distilling all of the purported health claims and attractive labels into hard facts. She talks about the industry and educates you on what will benefit you the most.
For example, one of the most common vitamins that physicians recommend is vitamin D (specifically D3) or an omega-3. The problem is that most physicians aren’t familiar with top brands. Dr. Low Dog can help you pick out which brand will be best for you.
3. Best Book on Health for Science-Based Health Advice
The title of this next book stands out a lot—How Not To Die. Even if it’s a little dark, the author, Dr. Greger, provides practical advice on how to not die. After all, according to Dr. Greger, we may be living longer, but we’re also living more of those years dealing with sickness.
In this book, he sets strict guidelines on how we should be dealing with illness and backs it up with sound and practical advice. The book aims to help you address the root causes of diseases rather than just treat the symptoms once you have them.
In terms of the advice in this book, Dr. Greger provides lifestyle factors like having whole foods and a plant-based diet. He also covers methods in preventing, stopping, and reversing death caused by heart and lung diseases, some cancers, and diabetes.
All of these sound great and best of all, these are all backed by scientific research. It’s a more reliable book compared to other longevity books. You can expect a plethora of citations citing back to various studies. All Dr. Greger did is take that information and put them into a comprehensive, easy-to-read book that you can act on immediately.
4. Greatest Book on Workout Recovery
Even if you’re not training to be an athlete, you may have heard “recovery” buzzing around on forums and in the gym. It’s gained in popularity, and it makes sense. Who wouldn’t want to recover quickly from a workout session and keep at it the very next day?
Just as much as working out and eating healthy is good, recovering properly from physical activities is important. In the book Good To Go, award-winning science journalist and competitive athlete Christie Aschwanden provides an entertaining and enlightening experience to the recovery side of training.
Overall, the book looks at why people care so much about this and some of the recent trends of recovery techniques, such as cryotherapy, floating, and infrared sauna bathing after training. Aschwanden provides analyses on whether they work or not.
On top of that, the book examines other recovery trends among athletes themselves like Michael Phelps’s “cupping” ritual or Tom Brady’s infrared sleep gear.
Even if you’re not an athlete, recovery techniques are flooding the market and this book provides practical advice and insight into whether these will work for you or whether you should move on.
5. Best Book on Health for Nutritional Details
Turn on the local news and you’ll find that a new health study has emerged that flips everything you know about health on its head. That or you’ll find a study that’ll suggest eating a certain way will put you more at risk of diabetes, obesity, or other cardiovascular problems based upon what you’ve eaten for breakfast.
This is one of the biggest problems in the health industry, and this is why so many are confused. One study supports a way of eating or health method while another goes against it entirely. What do you choose?
Well, one choice that’ll make your life easier is through a recent book: Nutrition in Crisis. In it, eminent biochemist and medical research Dr. Richard Feinman cuts through all of the noise and explains the intricacies of nutrition and human metabolism—all while avoiding scientific jargon.
Digging further, the book offers an unsparing critique of the nutritional establishment—an establishment that demonizes fat and refuses to acknowledge low-carb diets and ketogenic diets despite the fact there are now decades of evidence that suggest the exact opposite.
On top of that, the book contains essential tools to help you navigate through the world of nutrition with a level head and not be deterred by what you see in magazines or on the news. These are all explained in simple terms with a witty and wry tonne. It’s a refreshing and realistic take to the health world.
6. Greatest Book on Stress Management
Stress is a natural part of life by this point, and it’s something that we face every day. In light of this, there are hundreds of sources of information on dealing with stress. Out of these sources, The Power Source is a book you should look at. It’s written by celebrity trainer Lauren Roxburgh.
In it, Roxburgh explains a method to destress in a way that not many cover in their books or articles—using the pelvic floor. Roxburgh claims that many problems can be alleviated by unlocking the pelvic floor and improving your overall physical and mental health.
The pelvic floor is located at the root of your pelvis and Roxburgh believes that this determines the firmness of your core. The reason your core is important is that it is the point that determines how you manage stress and how much energy reaches the rest of your body—be it positive or negative.
What this book provides are methods to strengthen your pelvic floor along with four other “power centers” in your body. This is done through simple exercises, recipes, and simple at-home relaxation therapies. Through this, you’ll have better control over your own stress.
7. Best Book on Health for Beginner Plant-Based Eaters
Plant-based foods are starting to become more and more popular with companies emerging and creating plant-based beef. While there are people who are skeptical about the whole craze, this book sheds a lot of light on this phenomenon: The Plant-Based Boost.
In the book, renowned dietitian and nutritionist Melissa Halas explains to readers how incorporating plant-based foods in your diet can improve performance and achieve fitness goals. Whether you are an omnivore and working to eat less meat or a vegan, this book serves as a guide to help you with meal prepping to snack strategies to implement.
Furthermore, you’ll find several evidence-backed benefits of eating plant-based proteins and healthy fats. You’ll even find how various fluids and electrolyte strategies that’ll help you stay properly hydrated.
8. Greatest Cookbook
You may think cookbooks have fallen by the wayside with many sites offering hundreds or even thousands of recipes. However, there is still some charm of cracking open a physical textbook and following the recipe. On top of that, many cookbooks provide very niche focuses these days. That much is clear when it comes to the cookbook mentioned here: The Clean Plate.
What’s nice about this cookbook is that it delivers flexible and straightforward recipes for you to get into—well over 100 recipes in fact. These include soups, smoothies, entrees, snacks, and desserts, too.
Since many people can get recipes online, cookbooks also gravitate towards adding more information than your standard recipes. I picked this one since what it adds on top of the recipes is outstanding.
On top of the recipes, this book on health also provides tips from nutrition experts and offers meal plans based on common health concerns, such as heart health, adrenal support, and candida. These meal plans are based on what doctors and other nutritionists typically provide for those with those kinds of conditions. The cookbook also provides alternatives for vegans.
9. Best Book on General Healthy Eating
As mentioned before, the nutritional world is complicated with hundreds of studies being for and against certain foods and methods. For those not picking up nutritional books, it’s fair to say you could have some rough relationships with particular foods or even about certain health practices.
Eat To Love is a Buddhism-inspired book providing you with a healthy eating guide and time-tested techniques to help you with your eating relationship. This book talks about intuitive eating, meditation, and mindfulness to look at various prejudices around eating a certain way.
All in all, this book will help you with eating in a more nourishing, liberating, and enriching way.
10. Greatest and Easiest Book to Read
What’s nice about this list is that all of the information is condensed into easy-to-read, actionable advice. However, we won’t deny that there aren’t any complicated health books or information out there. Beyond that, there are many myths around the health industry, and it’s hard to tell what is real and helpful or what’ll waste your time.
The upside is that this book, Dressing On The Side, isn’t a complicated book to read. Registered dietitian Jaclyn London writes this book with ample research and wit to the point it sounds like you’re talking to your best friend. The overall premise of the book is to make the nutritional world fun and entertaining while providing valuable information that it’ll debunk many kinds of diet myths.
Every chapter in this book will provide you with a few bullet points of what you’ll achieve from the chapter. From there, the book will jump right into a well-thought-out discussion. These discussions are engaging and interesting and provide you with practical advice that’s backed by science. Overall, the goal is to help you have life-long habits and strategies that can lead to lasting change.
Final Thoughts
The nutritional world is filled with all kinds of thoughts and ideas. It goes to show that finding success health-wise can be done in so many different ways. In the end, you should do what makes you feel good, and I believe picking up some of these books will help you feel even better about some of the views and opinions floating around the nutritional world.
More Tips for a Healthy Body and Diet
- 15 Healthy Eating Tips from a Professional Health Coach
- 6 Reasons Why Diet Is More Important Than Exercising For Weight Loss
- 6 Nutrition Books That Will Transform Your Health
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