Jailed as a scapegoat for Stalin's famines, Vavilov had traveled over five continents, collected hundreds of thousands of seeds in an effort to outline the ancient centers of agricultural diversity. Gary Paul Nabhan weaves together Vavilov's story with his own expeditions to Earth's richest agricultural landscapes and the cultures that tend them.

In Food from the Radical Center, Gary Nabhan tells the stories of diverse communities who are getting their hands dirty and bringing back North America's unique fare: bison, sturgeon, camas lilies, ancient grains, turkeys, and more. These efforts have united people from the left and right, rural and urban, faith-based and science-based, in game-changing collaborations. Their successes are extraordinary by any measure, whether economic, ecological, or social.

Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus' landing had crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago; existed mainly in small nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas were, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last 30 years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.

As Serious Eats's culinary nerd-in-residence, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has pondered all these questions and more. Kenji shows that often, conventional methods don't work that well, and home cooks can achieve far better results using new - but simple - techniques. In hundreds of easy-to-make recipes, you will find out how to make foolproof Hollandaise sauce in just two minutes, how to transform one simple tomato sauce into a half dozen dishes, how to make the crispiest, creamiest potato casserole ever conceived, and much more.

A visionary new master class in cooking that distills decades of professional experience into just four simple elements, from the woman declared "America's next great cooking teacher" by Alice Waters.

We’re standing on the threshold of a new way of living, so why not make it vegan? It’s time to revolutionize the world - just by becoming the most authentic vegan version of you. As everyone stumbles out of lockdowns, many are searching for healthier ways to live their lives. With Rebel Vegan Life: A Radical Take on Veganism for a Brave New World, author and activist Todd Sinclair shows how vegan values are the only way forward in a post-pandemic world.

Rebel Vegan Life: Plant-Based Nutrition and Beginner’s Guide is the ideal manual for creating a whole vegan lifestyle - and creating it in your way. It’s not hard to be vegan. With Rebel Vegan, it is easy and delicious.

More than 30 years ago, nutrition researcher T. Colin Campbell and his team at Cornell University, in partnership with teams in China and England, embarked upon the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease. What they found, when combined with findings in Campbell's laboratory, opened their eyes to the dangers of a diet high in animal protein and the unparalleled health benefits of a whole foods, plant-based diet.

Dish up the red meat, eggs, and whole milk! In this well-researched and captivating narrative, veteran food writer Nina Teicholz proves how everything we've been told about fat is wrong. For decades, Americans have cut back on red meat and dairy products full of "bad" saturated fats. We obediently complied with nutritional guidelines to eat "heart healthy" fats found in olive oil, fish, and nuts, and followed a Mediterranean diet heavy on fruits, vegetables, and grains. Yet the nation's health has declined. What is going on?

Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it? Because in the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion—most of what we’re consuming today is longer the product of nature but of food science. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American Paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we see to become.

Physician and biochemist Cate Shanahan, MD, examined diets around the world known to help people live longer, healthier lives - diets like the Mediterranean, Okinawa, and Blue Zone - and identified the four common nutritional habits, developed over millennia, that unfailingly produce strong, healthy, intelligent children and active, vital elders generation after generation. These four nutritional strategies - fresh food, fermented and sprouted foods, meat cooked on the bone, and organ meats - form the basis of the Human Diet.

The authors offer unique insights into the factors that make us susceptible to dietary and lifestyle excesses and present ways to restore the biological processes designed by nature to keep us running at maximum efficiency and vitality.

Whether you are seeing a doctor, a nutritionist, or a trainer, all of them advise eating more protein. Foods, drinks, and supplements are loaded with extra protein. Many people use protein for weight control while others believe it gives them more energy. Now, weight loss expert Dr. Garth Davis asks, "Is all this protein making us healthier?" The answer, he emphatically argues, is no.

Over the past 50 years, rates of autoimmunity and chronic disease have exploded. In this provocative book, Dr. Thomas Cowan argues for a direct causal relationship to a corresponding increase in the number of vaccines American children typically receive. The goal of these vaccines is precisely what we’re now seeing in such abundance among our chronically ill children: the provocation of immune response. Cowan looks at emerging evidence that certain childhood illnesses are actually protective of disease later in life.

These days, probiotic yogurt and other "gut-friendly" foods line supermarket shelves. But what's the best way to feed our all-important microbiome - and what is a microbiome, anyway? In this engaging book, science journalist Katherine Harmon Courage investigates these questions, presenting a deep dive into the ancient food traditions and the latest research for maintaining a healthy gut.

A nutritional whodunit that takes readers from Greenland to Africa to Israel, The Queen of Fats gives a fascinating account of how we have become deficient in a nutrient that is essential for good health: the fatty acids know as omega-3s.

Can urban farms reduce neighborhood crime? These may not sound like typical questions for a family physician to consider, but in Farmacology, Daphne Miller, MD, ventures out of her medical office and travels to seven innovative family farms around the country on a quest to discover the hidden connections between how we care for our bodies and how we grow our food. Miller also seeks out the perspectives of noted biomedical scientists and artfully weaves in their research, along with stories from her own practice. Farmacology offers a profound new approach to healing.

This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers.

Why do some people age in failing health and sadness, while others grow old with vitality and joy? In this revolutionary audiobook, best-selling author John Robbins presents us with a bold new paradigm of aging, showing us how we can increase not only our lifespan but also our health span.

In Mycophilia, accomplished food writer and cookbook author Eugenia Bone examines the role of fungi as exotic delicacy, curative, poison, and hallucinogen, and ultimately discovers that a greater understanding of fungi is key to facing many challenges of the 21st century.

Science is beginning to understand that our thinking has a deep and complicated relationship with our eating. Our thoughts before, during, and after eating profoundly impact our food choices, our digestive health, our brain health, and more. Yet most of us give very little thought to our food beyond taste and basic nutritional content.

Whether you are seeing a doctor, a nutritionist, or a trainer, all of them advise eating more protein. Foods, drinks, and supplements are loaded with extra protein. Many people use protein for weight control while others believe it gives them more energy. Now, weight loss expert Dr. Garth Davis asks, "Is all this protein making us healthier?" The answer, he emphatically argues, is no.

Advice about food can be confusing. There's usually only one thing experts can agree on: some ingredients - often the most enjoyable ones - are bad for you, full stop. But as Aaron Carroll explains, these oversimplifications are both wrong and dangerous: if we stop consuming some of our most demonized ingredients altogether, it may actually hurt us.

In Missing Microbes, Dr. Martin J. Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome, where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the health and equilibrium of our body. Now this invisible eden is being irrevocably damaged by some of our most revered medical advances-antibiotics-threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes with terrible health consequences.

One of the great science and health revelations of our time is the danger posed by meat-eating. Every day, it seems, we are warned about the harm producing and consuming meat can do to the environment and our bodies. Many of us have tried to limit how much meat we consume, and many of us have tried to give it up altogether. But it is not easy to resist the smoky, cured, barbecued, and fried delights that tempt us.

An Epidemic of Absence asks what will happen in developing countries, which, as they become more affluent, have already seen an uptick in allergic disease: Will India end up more allergic than Europe? Velasquez-Manoff also details a controversial underground movement that has coalesced around the treatment of immune-mediated disorders with parasites. Against much of his better judgment, he joins these do-it-yourselfers and reports his surprising results.

Are you taking calcium or vitamin D? This book could save your life! Learn the secret to avoiding osteoporosis and heart disease. Millions of people take calcium and Vitamin D supplements thinking they're helping their bones. The truth is, without the addition of Vitamin K2, such a health regimen could prove dangerous. Without Vitamin K2, the body cannot direct calcium to the bones where it's needed; instead, the calcium resides in soft tissue, like the arteries, leading to a combination of osteoporosis and atherosclerosis, or the dreaded "calcium paradox".

You are just 10% human. For every one of the cells that make up the vessel that you call your body, there are nine impostor cells hitching a ride. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but also bacteria and fungi. Over your lifetime, you will carry the equivalent weight of five African elephants in microbes. You are not an individual but a colony. Until recently, we had thought our microbes hardly mattered, but science is revealing a different story, one in which microbes run our bodies and becoming a healthy human is impossible without them.

New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter has twice won the Global Health Council’s Excellence in Media Award, as well as the Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In Denialism, he fervently argues that people are turning away from new technologies and engaging in a kind of magical thinking that is hindering scientific progress.

We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the Enlightenment and cottonseed help spark the Industrial Revolution. And from the fall of Rome to the Arab Spring, the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.