I love reading and listening to books. I usually read about the same number of fiction as non-fiction each year, but this year was heavily scewed to fiction, because who needs reality? I also read at least 3-4 books at a time so I can choose what to read based on how I am feeling. Do I want a harmless mystery about a bunch of senior crime solvers, or a fantastical story of a ghost detective in London? But, most of the non-fiction books I read this year were about health science and here is a short list of non-fiction books that I recommend.
Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us, Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall PhD.
This begins with an excellent introduction to the basics of nutrition. The things I learned in first year university and not much has changed despite the noise around nutrition from many misguided sources. I was expecting more of the same but this book doesn’t stop there. With Kevin Hall, expert in human nutrition, metabolism, obesity, and neuroscience who resigned from the National Institute of Health after stating they were censoring his research findings and Julia Belluz, a Canadian journalist specializing in health and science reporting who is the senior health correspondent for American news website Vox this book is educational and entertaining. It is an indepth look at food research, marketing, the food environment and metabolism. It is good reading if you like to know what happens when we eat (or don’t eat, as in dieting).
The evidence on optimal nutrition has been clear and consistent over decades; it’s boring by this point. Eat more vegetables, along with fiber, legumes, whole grains and fruits. Limit sodium, sugar, saturated fat, and junk food.
The downside, while they mention the environmental impacts of our food system I think this could have been stronger especially with regards to lab-grown meat.
My rating 5/5
The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters, Timothy Caulfield
A good overview of our medical misinformation crisis. Timothy Caulfield is a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy and a Professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta. He explores how marketing and influencers take science-y sounding terms to fuel the misinformation crisis making it difficult for anyone to know what is real from what is fake news. This book explores how pseudoscience is promoted as “wellness” to fuel this spread of misinformation. While Timothy Caulfield blames the certainty illusion, and believes scientist should be better communicators, I think it is more basic than that, we are encouraged to look for the quick fix – the super food – instead of allowing for nuance or understanding the impact of food in all areas of life.
The goodness illusion is a messaging strategy designed to make us think (but don’t think too much, please) that a particular choice fits with what is viewed as the right thing.
The downside, it gets repetitive and the tone, is a bit “father knows best” which I found even while I was agreeing with his points, like I was being lectured. Timothy Caulfield also believes GMOs are harmless, but there is evidence that GMOs impact honeybees, can cause allergic reactions and cause farmers to lose control of their seeds while accelerating biodiversity loss.
My rating 3/5
The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning, Dr. Peter Hotez
Dr. Hotez is an American scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccinology, and neglected tropical disease control. He was one of the most trusted voices at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and worked on a non-profit vaccine. This book describes how the anti-vaccine grew and became established in American politics along with COVID. It is a short read with a history of the anti-science movement.
Our nation’s already depleted health system now faces the prospect of managing the long-term care of millions of Americans afflicted by long COVID cardiopulmonary and renal insufficiency and neurocognitive disturbances .
The downside, it is also repetitive, and discouraging as the ant-vax campaigns have claimed the health and lives of many people around the world.
My rating 3.5/5
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, John Green
This was the Good Reads winner of Reader’s Non-Fiction Favourite and it was definitely one of my favourite books of the year. It begins with what seems like a story of hopelessness and manages to offer a history of tuberculosis and optimism. It is easy to read, entertaining and educational. Not an easy feat for a history of tuberculosis. It explores a preventable disease that still kills more than a million of people worldwide.
And so we have entered a strange era of human history: A preventable, curable infectious disease remains our deadliest. That’s the world we are currently choosing.
Which makes me think, if we don’t learn from history…
Downside, have we learned from history?
My rating 5/5
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddartha Mukherjee
Okay be warned. If you are one of the worried well, don’t read this. By the time you are finished you will have convinced yourself that you have had every cancer mentioned in this book. This is a Pulitzer prize winning book that explores cancer from the first documented cases thousands of years ago through to the present with all the treatments in between. Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is also an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center. This book explains the history of cancer, including what it is and does, while exploring how we’ve tried to solve it and the many problems that cancer brings. It explores the history of treatment, human stories and the science.
Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases.
Downside, the history of cancer treatment has some barbaric remedies – some women had their arm amputated to ‘cut out’ breast cancer- I can only imagine how today’s treatments will be viewed in the (hopefully) not so distant future.
My rating 5/5
Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Johann Hari
This book was published in 2023 and I read it then, but now that it seems everyone is on a weight loss drug I thought I would give it another listen. Johann Hari, a bestselling author of other books I recommend, Lost Connections, Chasing the Scream, and Stolen Focus. Through his own personal weight loss struggles, he explores weight loss drugs and their effects. This is a personal story with interviews from a variety of sources and Johann is a good story teller.
But as I learned, we’ve had several moments in the past where the new diet drug was hailed as a “magic pill”, and then had to be yanked from the shelves because it was more deadly than obesity itself.
Downside, for a science book it is a bit light and Johann sometimes sounds like he has suddenly discovered something new!! When it is only new to him. He has also been known for “telling stories”
My rating 4/5
This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Young Doctor, Adam Kay
Adam Kay recounts his time in medical school and as a Junior Doctor in the British Medical System. It is also a TV series, which I haven’t watched, but the audiobook is funny and sad. As a young doctor pushed to his limits, Adam has captured the stress and uncertainty in health care from a physician’s perspective. Helping us understand the pressures that physician’s operate under and the way things can suddenly go very wrong.
I’m as big a fan of recycling as the next man, but if you turn a used condom inside out and put it back on for round two, it’s probably not going to be that effective.
Downside, Adam Kay wrote this a few years after quitting medicine, while the stress was overwhelming, his experience is lost for future patients.
My rating 5/5
Mind The Science: Saving your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry, Jonathan Stea, PhD
Another book about misinformation and how it harms us, this time told from the perspective of a clinical psychologist. Jonathan Stea is a professor and psychologist at the University of Calgary who examines the harm of wellness and medical pseudoscience on people looking for help. It focuses on helping people make better decisions about their mental health practices.
Brandolini’s law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Downsides, some of this should be fairly obvious – but I still believe that people know that an all meat diet isn’t healthy – it is a good reminder that the wellness industry is big business and to look critically at therapies and the practitioners that make up the $5 trillion wellness industry.
My rating 3.5/5
What are you reading?
Change your mind, change your health,
Shayla
How I chose my books:
1. Did I finish it?
2. Was it factual while holding my attention?
3. Did I refer back to it?
And finally, would I recommend it? Obviously, the answer is yes 🙂
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