To understand how to eat, we have to know why we eat
The more expert advice we hear about diet, the less clarity we have about what to eat. Leading researcher Kevin Hall and award-winning health journalist Julia Belluz want to cut through the smoke screen thrown up by the food industry on one side, and the diet gurus on the other, with this definitive book about food, diet, metabolism and nutrition.
We evolved to eat everything. If we eat a starchy potato or a fatty steak, the chemical pathways and hormone responses will look different but in the short term the net result is the same: we get the calories we need for fuel. But what result will that diet have in the long term? Hall and Belluz tease out the answers, examining the underlying truth about popular food plans (keto, vegan, pescatarian), the critical impact of micronutrients, what we really know about the microbiome, and the truth that in terms of weight loss – but not necessarily our health – a calorie is a calorie.
Nutrition isn't rocket science; it's harder. This accessible, illuminating, often funny book will change how you think about food forever. Kevin Hall, PhD is an internationally recognized expert in nutrition, metabolism, and obesity research. A physicist by training, he is tenured Senior Investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD. Hall has twice received the Director's Award from both the NIH and the NIDDK and has also received the E.V. McCullum Award from the American Society for Nutrition, the Lilly Scientific Achievement Award from The Obesity Society, and the Guyton Award for Excellence in Integrative Physiology from the American Society of Physiology.
Julia Belluz is a health journalist at Vox who focuses on translating medical research and scientists' big ideas into clear and precise language. She has worked on Netflix, podcasts, SnapChat, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and has been published widely on the subject of health science, in the Economist, ProPublica, Los Angeles Times, Slate, British Medical Journal, Maclean's, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post. Belluz was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She presents at health science and journalism forums around the world, actively training the next generation of journalists and communicators.
