Reading Recommendations and Last Minute Christmas Gift Ideas for the Person Interested in Health 🎄
Think of this post as a reading list for the new year.
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We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a post I should have written several weeks ago except that the idea didn’t occur to me.
However, most of these gifts are books that come in the mail very quickly. So if you need a last-minute gift idea, this post may be just in time. Alternatively, for the uber planners, think of this post as your head-start on Christmas ideas for next year. 🤣
One important caveat: please don’t see this post as advocating buying health or fasting books as gifts for people you think need them. That is the surest way to alienate someone. These are gift ideas for people who have expressed interest in learning more and whom you know want help in this way.
If you have someone in your life who needs this info but you don’t know how to broach the topic, the very best strategy is to start working on yourself. After you’ve had some success, gently share with others the blessings of the changes you’ve seen. It’s never a bad idea to have some extra books on hand to hand out when people seem interested, just don’t give them at birthdays or Christmas without knowing the person wants them.
Another idea of how to use this list: In my extended family, we use the website Giftster to compile wishlists of things we want. You could put these books on your wishlist for the future.
Lastly, think of this list as reading ideas for the new year.
1. Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon: For the person interested in cooking healing foods
I’m going to be so bold as to say this is an absolute must-read for everyone who is a human being. You live in a body—nothing you can do about it. Your body needs to be nourished. There has been so much lost wisdom that needs to be recovered. Read a few pages at a time and put one thing into practice. Then read a few more pages. Try another thing. Part cookbook, part helpful explanation for why to eat this way.
2. The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Capon: For the person who wants to grow as a cook but needs inspiration (all of us)
Supper of the Lamb remains one of my all-time favorite books because Capon understands people as beings who eat, not merely to get calories into their bodies, but to enjoy and feast on life. The book is a poignant meditation on cooking while also casting a beautiful vision for enjoying life well through God's good gift of food. This vision is cast through humble reflections on eating simple yet carefully prepared meals with an eye for how God speaks to us through food and creation.
When I last read this book several years ago, I determined not to be a hearer only but also a doer, so it sparked my foray into making bone broth, a practice that continues to his day. This one change has had a tremendously positive impact on my cooking.
A few years after reading this book, after I’d thrown myself passionately into fasting, I was intrigued to again pick up the book and read the following quote on the back cover that I had forgotten I had ever read:
Should a true man want to lose weight, let him fast. Let him sit down to nothing but coffee and conversation, if religion or reason bid him do so; only let him not try to eat his cake without having it. Any cake he could do that with would be a pretty spooky proposition—a little golden calf with dietetic icing, and no taste worth having. Let us fast, then—whenever we see fit, and as strenuously as we should. But having gotten that exercise out of the way, let us eat.
There was the answer to all my diet troubles, hiding in plain sight, yet I simply did not have the ears to hear it until returning to the book a few years later.
Capon, writing in 1967, saw through all the diet fads that would plague the next five decades. He knew long before IF was “a thing,” that fasting and then feasting on rich, nourishing foods has always been the answer.
I also love this quote from chapter 15 “The Long Session” (pg 171 from the hardcover version):
The dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being—a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup, fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to last forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight. Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls, the formal dinner for six, eight, or ten chosen guests, the true convivium—the long Session that brings us nearly home.
3. Fast.Feast.Repeat. by Gin Stephens: For the person who wants to learn more about the basics of fasting
This book is both practical and replete with easy-to-understand explanations for why and how fasting works. Although this is not for the researcher who likes to dig deep into the science behind fasting, it’s a good starting point for everyone. One can always move on to more advanced books later. That’s what I did.
4. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price: For the person interested in using nutrition to heal from chronic disease
Price was a dentist who set out on a mission to understand why indigenous cultures had so few cavities, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases that ail modern societies. What he discovered about the health-wrecking effects of the modern diet has never been more relevant than it is today. His prescriptions for healing through food are easy and life-transforming.
5. Why We Get Sick by Benjamin Bikman: For the Person Interested in science-based research on health and nutrition
Insulin is the hormone that rages wildly through the veins of those subsisting on a modern, highly processed diet. Since insulin is a master hormone with over 200 functions in the body, Dr. Bikman set out to uncover insulin’s link to modern disease. He documents fascinating connections and shows how reducing insulin can alleviate heart disease, diabetes, migraines, cancer risk, high blood pressure, and nearly every chronic disease. This book is written in such a way that anyone willing to put on their thinking cap should be able to grasp the science.
6. The Obesity Code by Jason Fung: For the person interested in the science of losing weight
The Obesity Code delivers straightforward talk about why “eat more move less” advice fails 95% of people in the long term. It gives the physiological science behind how fasting and lowering carbs lowers insulin, reduces hunger, resets your body’s set weight, and allows you to keep weight off forever. Fascinating and well-researched!
7. The Diabetes Code by Jason Fung: For the person wanting a clear explanation about how type 2 diabetes can be easily cured
Here’s the info that few doctors will give you when you’re diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. It’s a mystery—there’s a disease that affects one in two Americans yet most doctors don’t know the cure. But you can.
8. Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind by Georgia Ede: For the person interested in how low carb heals mental health
I haven’t read this book yet as it will be released in January. But I’m very excited to read it.
9. The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz: For the person interested in the politics of health messaging
Nina Teicholz tells the intriguing story of how over the last 50 years, many scientists squelched the evidence that sugar and carbs, not saturated fat, are responsible for heart disease.
She interviewed numerous scientists and researched for this book for over 10 years. Here’s just a small sample of what she uncovered. She interviewed the organic chemist David Kritchevsky, one of the twentieth century’s most revered nutrition scientists. He was on a panel for the National Academy of Sciences and explains what happened when he suggested loosening the dietary recommendations that restrict dietary fat.
“We were jumped on! he told me. “People would spit on us! It’s hard to imagine now, the heat of the passion. It was just like we had desecrated the American flag. They were so angry that we were going against the suggestions of the American Heart Association an the National Institutes of Health.”
This kind of reaction met all experts who criticized the prevailing view on dietary fat, effectively silencing any opposition. Researchers who persisted in their challenges found themselves cut off from grants, unable to rise in their professional societies, without invitations to serve on expert panels, and at a loss to find scientific journals that would publish their papers. Their influence was extinguished and their viewpoints lost. As as a result, for many years the public has been presented with the appearance of a uniform scientific consensus on the subject of fat, especially saturated fat, but this outward unanimity was only made possible because opposing view were pushed aside.
Nina Teicholz is an excellent writer who makes the topic of nutrition messaging into a compelling read. This book is also an example of how commercial interests can influence science. For a sample of her writing, check out her Substack.
10. Polyface Micro by Joel Salatin: For the person interested in small-scale regenerative farming
11. Folks, This Ain’t Normal by Joel Salatin: For the person interested in raising chickens for eggs
12. Homestead Tsunami by Joel Salatin: For the person interested in homesteading
(not yet released but available for preorder)
13. Artisan Sourdough Made Simple by Emilie Raffa: For the person interested in starting a sourdough bread habit
The first time I made sourdough bread, I printed off a recipe from the Internet that had, I kid you not, 30 steps over three days. The bread was tasty but hardly worth the time and effort. Then someone recommended this book. Voila, I made a simple recipe with three easy steps over only 12 hours with minimal time. The bread tasted every bit as good to me as the wildly elaborate recipe.
These recipes are great for beginners yet the book includes more advanced recipes as well. The beginning of the book includes everything you need to know about feeding and caring for starter, including how to make your own from scratch.
Despite living in a town where every third friend of mine has an active starter on the counter, one of my daughters cultivated one from scratch this summer, and it has remained the best and most active starter we’ve ever used. (A healthy starter should double within 24 hours of being fed and ours regularly doubles in 4 hours even in winter!)
For the sourdough beginner, consider gifting these rising baskets, these hotel pans for baking the bread in, this scorer, and this rising bucket.
14. The Carnivore Cookbook by Maria and Craig Emmerich: For the Person Interested in Using Carnivore for Healing
I was impressed with the simplicity and the variety of these recipes, and the helpful research in the first few chapters about who can be helped by carnivore. Craig Emmerich suffered from Lyme’s disease for over a decade and tried nearly every treatment both natural and conventional, including rounds of antibiotics and other medications. He was finally able to heal his Lyme’s through the carnivore diet.
I have a close friend who had the exact same experience with Lyme’s and has now put it into remission through carnivore. You can hear Craig tell his full story on this podcast.
The cookbook is also a great way to grow in your ability to cook meat even if you aren’t on a carnivore diet.
Have a very merry Christmas and I wish you and your loved ones a year of reading and growing in your knowledge about health,
Leslie 🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄
P.S. Don’t forget about gifting someone a subscription to the paid content of this Substack.
Thank you for this wonderful list. I am familiar with some of the books but plan to work my way through most of the rest.
I love it when you share recipes, please continue!
This is wonderful! Thank you for compiling this