Annotated Bibliography
The book list is organized by section:
This list is not meant to be an exhaustive bibliography. It mainly contains books that I think are
especially good, but also includes a few that are well known but in my opinion less good (with comments
as to why).
Purchasing books through the links on this page helps to support this Web site.
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Bowel Disease (top)
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Straight from the Gut: Living with Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis was written by
someone with severe Crohn's Disease who eventually had surgery to remove his colon and now is well.
He became a support group facilitator for others with IBD and wrote this book. This book is 2-3 times
longer than the Saibil book (below), and has a lot of useful information about working successfully
with doctors and hospitals, and coping with the emotional aspects.
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Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis is a thorough and detailed overview of inflammatory
bowel disease, especially of use to the newly afflicted. (If you've had it for a while, it may not
tell you anything you don't know.) The book was written by a gastroenterologist, and has the
usual Western-medicine bias against diet making any difference to your disease.
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Diets to Heal IBS and IBD (top)
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What to Eat with IBD was written by someone with inflammatory bowel disease who went back
to school to become a registered dietician. She now specializes in helping people with IBD figure
out what to eat. This is a great book - very well grounded in both experience and book learning.
The cover of the book says that the principles she lays out are also useful for IBS.
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Eating for IBS was written by a woman with IBS. Be warned: she's very interested in selling
her products - teas, fiber supplements, etc. Still, she has good information about foods that
irritate the bowel. I've been trying her acacia supplement, and it doesn't do a thing for me - I
think because the viscosity is too low. Psyllium, in contrast, took away my diarrhea. Maybe
acacia is enough for people who have IBS but not IBD. Or maybe my current flare is too much
for acacia.
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NeanderThin: Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body was written by a computer
programmer with numerous, debilitating autoimmune diseases that conventional medicine could not cure.
He did some investigating on his own, and discovered a mass of research strongly suggesting that obesity and
autoimmune disease is caused by changes in the human diet that occurred at the end of the paleolithic age
10,000 years ago, when humans shifted from 2 million years of hunting and gathering to farming.
He switched to a paleolithic diet and all his autoimmune diseases went away. Click
here for a brief overview
of paleolithic nutrition.
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Nutrition (top)
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The Protein Power Life Plan was written by two MDs who are married to each other, and specialize in helping people to lose
weight through excellent nutrition. This book has one of the best summaries of what makes for good nutrition
that I've seen. It also talks about the other health effects (besides obesity) of eating of different foods.
It's a great book. If you only want to read one book on nutrition, read this one. There are other books by these authors,
but this is the one that has the great section on nutrition.
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The Schwarzbein Principle: The Truth About Weight Loss, Health, and Aging was writting by an doctor -
and endocrinologist - whose practice focuses heavily on helping people to lose weight. She's Suzanne Somers'
doctor. The book is an excellent source of information about nutrition, and explains very clearly why many
widely held ideas are simply wrong - in particular, the erroneous belief that dietary fat is bad for you
or causes you to gain weight. In fact, dietary fat is essential for health. Only damaged fats are bad for you.
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Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats
is a gigantic cookbook (about the size of the NYC telephone directory) filled with excellent, meticulously
researched information about nutrition, and interesting anecdotes about food history. The recipes show how to
cook in a way that's both delicious and healthy.
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