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Overwhelming Evidence
In Search of the Optimal Human Diet is a deeply researched guide built around the conviction that a plant-based diet is the clearest answer to meeting our nutritional needs. What did you hope to contribute to the conversation about nutrition that other books have not?
While there is no shortage of books on nutrition, I have noticed in my personal life as well as in popular media that most laypeople don’t know the basic chemical composition of the essential nutrients—proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, vitamins, and minerals—leaving them without the requisite knowledge to comprehend the complex metabolic pathways by which our bodies assimilate food. In Search of the Optimal Human Diet bridges that gap by exploring the history of nutritional science from the discovery of nutrients to breaking the biochemical codes of metabolic process. In so doing, readers learn how metabolites from digesting plant foods lead to vibrant health, while metabolites from digesting animal foods lead to degenerative diseases. I have read dozens of books on diet and nutrition, but I have yet to find one that presents the evidence in this easily digestible format that breaks down this complex subject matter into small, bite-sized pieces.
Were there moments in the history of nutrition that changed your own thinking about science?
Yes. In the first two decades after World War II, evidence was mounting from observational studies that people living in the US and Western Europe, where animal-centric diets were the norm, had much higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, and cancers than people living in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, where plant-based diets were the norm. It was during this crucial period, under extreme pressure from the powerful animal products industries, that the mainstream medical establishment made the conscious decision to treat degenerative diseases with drugs and surgeries rather than prevention through diet and nutrition. This sad episode in the history of nutrition taught me that science is often manipulated by special interests for their own purposes, so it became incumbent upon me to verify the independence of my sources.
How do you respond to readers who agree with your goals but question whether one dietary pattern fits everyone?
We humans, are great apes, and our physiology is very similar to our close great ape relatives: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. These species are all herbivores; no one would suggest they have subgroups that need meat or dairy to be healthy. So why is it then that of all the great apes, only humans don’t fit one dietary pattern? The overwhelming evidence from literally thousands of observational, interventional, and pathological studies has shown that Homo sapiens as a species thrive on a diet of whole plant foods and succumb to degenerative diseases on an animal-centric diet. Of course, this isn’t to say that there is one plant-based diet that fits all. There are many people who have allergies to various plant foods, and they should definitely avoid those foods. Fortunately, there is so much variety in the plant kingdom that everyone can build their own plant-based diet that is both nutritious and delicious.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from In Search of the Optimal Human Diet?
This is an easy one: Think of a plant-based diet not as an exercise in self-deprivation, but rather as an opportunity for self-empowerment. You can be the master of your own health.
Author Links: NetGalley | Website
Nutritional Science
In Search of the Optimal Human Diet gives readers a history of nutritional science that treats nutrition as a developing scientific story rather than a set of trendy rules. How has your own experience with diet influenced the conclusions in the book?
My own experience with a whole-food, plant-based diet has conformed to the findings of nutritional science. While my father, who ate an animal-centric diet died of a massive heart attack at age 51, I show no evidence of heart disease at age 73, and I still lead a physically active life. When I observe my peers who eat an animal-centric diet many of them suffer from late-stage degenerative diseases. My personal experience does not constitute scientific proof, but it has definitely reinforced my confidence that I’m on the right track.
What types of evidence—epidemiological, clinical, or mechanistic—do you find most compelling?
What I find most compelling is that in the study of nutritional science, all three of these evidence-based branches of scientific inquiry have reached the same conclusion: humans thrive on a whole-food, plant-based diet and succumb to degenerative diseases on an animal-centric diet. The fact that these three different approaches to the study of nutritional science corroborate each other makes an extremely powerful case for the efficacy of a whole-food, plant-based diet.
How should readers think about sugar, salt, and processed food within your model?
As I have demonstrated in my book, a whole-food, plant-based diet is the optimal human diet. While sugar and many processed foods are plant-based, they are not whole foods. This is important because whole plant foods contain many nutrients, including fiber, that are extracted from processed foods. In effect, processed foods supply nutrient-poor calories that replace the nutrient-rich calories found in whole plant foods. Salt is a mineral compound of sodium and chloride. Sodium and chloride are essential nutrients, but we get enough of them from whole plant foods and don’t need to supplement with table salt. Excess salt in the diet is a risk factor for high blood pressure. Most people get the essential mineral iodine from iodized salt, but seaweed is a healthier option.
What misconceptions do you hope this book helps correct?
There are many, but here are two:
1) One common misconception is that humans need lots of protein in our diet to be strong and healthy. This misconception stems from experiments conducted over a century ago on rats. Since then, interventional studies on actual humans have shown conclusively that our protein requirements are actually quite modest and easily met with a whole-food, plant-based diet; indeed, studies have shown that animal protein in the diet is a risk factor for heart disease and cancer. And yet, this high-protein myth persists to this day.
2) Another common misconception is that nutritional science is inconclusive and that the evidence from scientific studies is often contradictory. This misconception has been manufactured by the animal products and processed food industries. They have used their immense financial resources to fund research designed to produce results favorable to them. These biased studies are then fed to laypeople in expensive public relations campaigns to confuse the issue. Meanwhile, research conducted by independent, objective scientists is often suppressed in the popular media. Among truly independent researchers, the science is pointing in one direction: toward the efficacy of a whole-food, plant-based diet to treat and prevent chronic degenerative diseases.
Author Links: NetGalley | Website
In Search of the Optimal Human Diet: A Layperson’s Guide to Nutritional Science
In Search of the Optimal Human Diet is a clear walk-through of the history of nutritional science, written for readers who want the science without needing a biochemistry degree. The book starts with early experiments on scurvy, protein, carbohydrates, lipids, vitamins, and minerals, then keeps building toward its central argument: the strongest evidence points to a whole-food, plant-based diet as the best path for long-term human health. Spitz brings a personal reason for caring about the subject, but the book’s main energy comes from its steady march through discoveries, studies, and the people behind them.
I liked how it treats nutrition as a developing scientific story rather than a set of trendy rules. Spitz spends time with researchers like James Lind, Antoine Lavoisier, Justus von Liebig, Hans Krebs, and many others, showing how each discovery helped explain what food does inside the body. That historical approach gives the book a sturdy backbone. Instead of jumping straight to advice, it shows how scientists learned to measure, test, revise, and sometimes abandon older ideas.
The book becomes more pointed as it moves into modern degenerative diseases, especially heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity. Spitz’s voice is strongest when he connects observational studies, intervention studies, pathology, and the gut microbiome into one larger case for plant-centered eating. He’s direct about his conclusion, writing that plant-based nutrition is “the only game in town,” and that confidence shapes the whole book. Even when the material gets technical, the tone stays readable, with enough plain-language explanation to keep a general reader moving.
The final chapters and appendices make the book feel practical as well as historical. Spitz discusses fiber, the microbiome, vitamin B12, vitamin D, essential fatty acids, trans fats, sugar, salt, food additives, agricultural chemicals, and genetically modified foods. The section on Dr. Michael Greger’s Daily Dozen gives readers something concrete to picture: beans, berries, greens, whole grains, flaxseed, nuts, spices, beverages, and exercise. By the end, Spitz brings the argument back to a simple idea: “You are what you eat.”
In Search of the Optimal Human Diet is a passionate and research-heavy guide for readers who want to understand why whole plant foods matter, not just be told to eat more vegetables. It’s part science history, part health argument, and part personal invitation to rethink everyday food choices. Spitz writes with the conviction of someone who has lived the diet he’s recommending, and that gives the book a grounded, practical feel. For readers curious about nutrition, longevity, and the science behind plant-based eating, it’s a thoughtful and accessible place to start.
Pages: 337 | ISBN : 9781662973574
In Search of the Optimal Human Diet: A Layperson’s Guide to Nutritional Science
Jonathan Spitz’s In Search of the Optimal Human Diet is an ambitious and deeply researched layperson’s guide to nutritional science, built around one central conviction: that a whole-food, plant-based diet is not a fringe preference but the clearest answer emerging from centuries of nutritional inquiry. Spitz begins with a personal wound, his father’s fatal heart attack at fifty-one, then widens the lens into a sweeping history of discovery, from James Lind’s citrus experiment with scurvy-stricken sailors to the work of Lavoisier, Liebig, Krebs, Ornish, Esselstyn, and Greger. The book moves from deficiency diseases to diseases of excess, from vitamins and macronutrients to the microbiome, ending with a firm argument for fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and a conscious avoidance of animal and heavily processed foods.
What I found most compelling is the book’s insistence that nutrition is a story of hard-won knowledge, not casual advice. Spitz has a gift for making scientific history feel alive, especially when he slows down over moments of intellectual trial and error. Lind’s oranges and lemons, Lavoisier’s calorimeter, Magendie’s unsettling dog experiments, and Krebs’s painstaking mapping of metabolic cycles all become part of a larger human drama: the body gradually yielding its secrets to measurement, curiosity, and revision. I admired the humility embedded in that structure. Even when the author writes with absolute confidence about plant-based eating, the historical chapters remind us that science advances by correcting itself. That gives the book a sturdy moral rhythm, as if every mistaken theory still carries value because it helped clear the path.
Spitz’s passion is unmistakable and often moving. The sections on observational and interventional studies, especially the discussions of wartime Norway, The China Study, Ornish, Esselstyn, and plant-based diabetes interventions, make a persuasive cumulative case. Phrases that cast opposing voices as unserious or contaminated by industry influence may satisfy readers already inclined to agree. I appreciated the author’s practical honesty in places like the appendix on vitamin B12, where he acknowledges that a plant-based diet requires supplementation in the modern world. That kind of candor strengthens the argument because it admits that an ideal diet still has real-world obligations.
The book is at its best when it braids biography, chemistry, and public health into one flowing narrative. It can be dense, sometimes almost encyclopedic. Yet I rarely felt that the detail was merely decorative. Spitz writes like someone who has lived with these ideas for decades, and his conviction gives the material warmth. The conclusion returns to that personal beginning with satisfying emotional force: the son who lost his father to heart disease becomes the older man who sees food as empowerment rather than deprivation. I’d recommend In Search of the Optimal Human Diet to thoughtful general readers, plant-curious eaters, health professionals open to nutrition-centered prevention, and anyone who wants a serious, historically grounded case for whole-food, plant-based living.
Pages: 337 | ISBN : 9781662973574
Listening to Spravato
Listening to Spravato, by Justin Page, is a personal and practical meditation on how music shapes the experience of Spravato treatment for depression. Part memoir, part guide, and part argument for more intentional clinical care, the book follows the author’s journey from years of severe depression and suicide attempts into the fragile, complicated hope offered by esketamine sessions. Page explores the Spravato chair as more than a medical setting, showing how light, blankets, headphones, silence, clinicians, playlists, and even the soft crunch of recorded snow can become part of the treatment environment. At its center is a clear and quietly radical idea: when the mind is most vulnerable, sound isn’t background. It’s structure, shelter, and sometimes a lifeline.
What moved me most was the book’s tenderness toward suffering without ever turning it into spectacle. Page writes about depression with an intimacy that feels earned, especially in the personal note where he remembers being sixteen and feeling that the word “depression” was far too small for the storm it named. That passage gives the rest of the book its emotional gravity. The later chapters on playlists, clinic rooms, and session phases could have felt purely technical, but they don’t, because they’re rooted in the lived knowledge of someone who has needed these tools to survive. I found the “one bad trip” chapter especially striking. The absurd interruption of a Spotify ad, followed by the terrifying intrusion of a screaming solo flute and a rumbling Beethoven passage, makes the book’s central argument suddenly visceral. Page doesn’t merely tell us that sound matters under Spravato. He lets us feel how quickly music can become a menace when the self is unmoored.
The writing is strongest when it trusts its own lyric intelligence. Page has a gift for turning sensory experience into language that feels both precise and haunted: ambient music becomes architecture, a soft piano feels like a hand on the shoulder, public soundscapes offer “the comfort of a crowd without the threat of contact.” I admired the way he balances poetic reflection with practical restraint. He’s skeptical of mystical claims about 432 Hz and “healing frequencies,” yet he’s generous enough to admit that symbolism can matter when the nervous system is open and afraid. Its ideas are persuasive because they are humble. Page isn’t selling music as magic. He’s arguing that care is often found in the smallest, adjustable details.
I came away from Listening to Spravato with a renewed respect for the unseen textures of healing, for the chair, the headphones, the nurse outside the door, and the final grounding track that helps a person return to themselves. This is a compassionate, idiosyncratic, and quietly necessary book, one that makes a convincing case that treatment environments should be designed with more imagination and more mercy. I’d recommend it to Spravato patients, clinicians, clinic owners, music therapists, and anyone interested in how sound can help hold a person steady when language has gone temporarily out of reach.
Pages: 118 | ISBN: 9798256399498
Mind Reset: The Science of Total Weight Management
Mind Reset by Bill Sun is an ambitious, philosophically grounded approach to weight management that argues lasting change begins not with a harsher diet or a more punishing exercise plan, but with a genuine “mind reset.” Sun builds his Total Weight Management framework around three interdependent pillars: Total Quality Nutrition, Total Physical Activity, and Total Mind Flow. The book moves from the global obesity crisis and the failures of calorie-centered thinking into a broader system of food quality, daily movement, mindfulness, environmental awareness, and cognitive decision-making. The foreword’s story of Maggie Meng’s 66-pound weight loss gives the theory an emotional anchor, especially as it contrasts slimming teas, starvation dieting, keto fatigue, injury, and frustration with a gentler, more sustainable rhythm of home cooking, outdoor movement, table tennis, and mindful practice.
There’s a humane intelligence in Sun’s insistence that weight gain isn’t simply a failure of discipline, and that confusion itself can become a health burden. His critique of “calories in, calories out” feels especially resonant because he doesn’t deny biology, but asks for a fuller biology, one that includes food processing, hormonal response, stress, environment, habit, and meaning. The Weight-Impact Food Typology, with its 4-star to 0-star ranking, is a practical example of the book at its best: conceptual without becoming airy, structured without feeling punitive. I also appreciated the way Sun treats movement as something larger than gym time. Walking, outdoor activity, household motion, daylight, and play become part of a living ecology rather than chores to be logged and endured.
The writing is serious, layered, and at times almost solemn in its intellectual architecture. I admired its range, from process philosophy and Taoism to systems theory, mindfulness, metabolism, and behavioral change. Still, I occasionally felt the book’s scholarly density pressing against its warmer purpose. Some sections carry the rhythm of an academic treatise more than a personal guide, and the abundance of frameworks, tables, and terminology can make the reading experience feel heavy. Yet that same density also gives the book its integrity. Sun isn’t offering a breezy wellness slogan; he’s trying to rebuild the reader’s assumptions from the foundation up. The ideas that stayed with me most were the CMDA model, Comprehension, Motivation, Determination, and Activation, and the notion that mindful change must eventually become ordinary action. Insight alone rarely saves us. We need repeated, embodied choices until the new self has somewhere to live.
Mind Reset is a thoughtful, earnest, and expansive contribution to the weight-management conversation. Its concluding strength is its refusal to separate the body from the mind, the plate from the environment, or health from the habits and hopes that quietly shape a person’s days. I’d recommend it especially to reflective readers who’ve grown weary of fad diets, to health coaches and wellness professionals looking for a broader conceptual model, and to anyone who wants a weight-management book with both scientific seriousness and philosophical heart.
Pages: 895 | ASIN : B0GMKXFBN9
Strength Training for Seniors Over 60: Safe and Effective Exercises to Improve Balance, Increase Mobility, and Stay Independent in Just 20 Minutes a Day
After reading Strength Training for Seniors Over 60 by Adina Vitalis, I came away feeling both informed and inspired. This guide is packed with practical advice, engaging encouragement, and detailed instruction designed specifically for older adults looking to improve their strength, balance, and independence. The book breaks down the science of aging and how tailored exercise can combat common issues like muscle loss, joint stiffness, and fall risk. Structured workout plans, safety tips, and lifestyle insights, including nutrition, sleep, and mindset, are all covered in a clear, conversational tone. Best of all, it promises real change in just 20 minutes a day, which makes it feel both achievable and sustainable.
What I liked most was the way the author addresses fear and doubt head-on. Adina Vitalis has a knack for making you feel seen. She anticipates the common excuses or anxieties like “I’m too old,” or “I might fall,” or “I don’t have time,” and gently dismantles them with facts, compassion, and stories of real seniors who made it work. The voice is friendly, and she’s practical without being boring. The chapter on building a home workout space with stuff you already have really resonated with me personally. It reminded me that exercise doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Her analogies, like the one comparing our bodies to aging cars that need maintenance, are simple, relatable, and effective.
One thing I appreciated was how the book reinforced key ideas throughout. Topics like goal setting and the benefits of resistance bands come up more than once, which really helps the messages stick. This kind of repetition can be a great way to make sure the information sinks in, especially for readers who are new to exercise or returning after a long break. The writing stays focused and purposeful, consistently reminding you of what matters most. At times, it felt more like a knowledgeable coach guiding you step by step rather than rushing ahead, which makes the book feel steady, thoughtful, and built to support long-term success.
I’d recommend this book to anyone over 60 or even approaching it who wants to take control of their health and stay independent longer. It’s especially great for people who’ve never exercised or are coming back to it after a long break. If you’ve got aging parents or grandparents who could use a little nudge, this book is a gentle but firm push in the right direction. It’s not flashy or filled with gimmicks. It’s just solid advice, clearly laid out, with real heart behind it.
Pages: 144 | ISBN : 978-1069069900
Health Literacy
Nurse Florence®, What Are Platelets? follows a school nurse as she answers three students’ questions about platelets, explaining what they are, where they come from, what they do, and how we keep them healthy. How do you approach writing about medical topics to make the topic interesting for children?
I trust in my belief that kids can learn complicated things as long as we explain them thoroughly.
How did you develop the personalities for Jean, Condi, and Sonia, who are prominent characters throughout the series?
My niece, Sandra Islas, you illustrated the first book was the one who came up with the three characters. I loved the diversity of a Caucasian, Hispanic, and African American who were all friends so I just continued it with all the other books. It shows the collaboration I do with my illustrators that give them some guidelines and they create their own Nurse Florence® universe.
What do the words “literary success” mean to you? How do you picture it?
With all the great book reviews and many book awards the series has won, I do believe Nurse Florence® is already a literary success. I wish the series to become a global phenomenon so that health literacy levels around the world are drastically improved.
Tell us something about yourself that we likely don’t know? The more obscure the better.
I write the Nurse Florence® series at my kitchen table surrounded by many depictions of the Florence Nightingale Pledge. She was an amazing woman, and I truly hope my series honors her.
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