The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth About What You Should Eat and Why Paperback – January 1, 2007

`The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth' by Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S. is the latest and best of the healthy eating genre, the `best foods' book. Earlier entries in this category are `Superfoods' by Steven Pratt, M.D. and Kathy Matthews and the '12 Best Foods Cookbook' by Dana Jacobi. Bowden's book is different in three directions from these other volumes. First, it contains no recipes. This is little loss, as the second difference, the much longer list of `good' foods more than makes it up. One can quite easily find good recipes for these foods by yourself. For starters, just get Pratt and Jacobi's books! The third difference is that the author has many comments on what is NOT good for you, what you should avoid, as well as the many things you should search out.The very best news in this book is the revelation (or confirmation, if you are up on your nutritional news flashes) that coffee, wine, butter, eggs, chocolate, cinnamon and watermelon are GOOD FOR YOU! One of the biggest surprises is that most soy products and many milk products (although NOT cheese and yogurt) are NOT good for you. Weak soy products include soy milk and tofu. Fermented soy products such as miso, like so many other fermented food products (yogurt, Kimchee, cheeses and sauerkraut) are still valuable, enhanced by the friendly bacteria responsible for the fermentation.In spite of all the great news about some guilty pleasures, Bowden gives no relief for the bread and pasta lovers among us. It seems that grains such as wheat and rice, no matter how `unfussed about with', are high in `empty calories'. Processed white grain and their wheats come off as being close to being poisonous! I'm exaggerating, of course, but I sometimes have the feeling that our good Dr. Bowden sometimes overstates his case just a smidge. One example that caught my eye was his opinion on the relative value of the commercially packaged honey (regardless of flowery source) versus raw honey in the comb. While I am not intimate with all the details of honey processing, I have seen some of the steps, and I honestly can't see how a bit of centrifugation and even pasteurization can succeed in turning something good into something bad or at least neutral. On the other hand, Bowden does agree with a general position on food processing that claims that all heat treatment such as pasteurization degrades foods. The entire `Raw' food movement is based on this premise. So, while I am not ready to go out and buy my dehydrator and ship my range off to the metal recycler, I chalk some points up to the `Raw' camp from this very knowledgeably written book. One question I would pose to the Raw camp is how can you deal with especially good foods such as bitter greens which are almost inedible, or at least unpalatable if left uncooked.One thing I find missing in this and virtually all other books on nutrition is a good practical sense of what in economics is called the marginal value of one food over another. For example, what is the practical difference to us between raw honey and `processed' honey. I will grant the difference, but is that difference worth the effort required to search out a source for raw honey when the `Sue Bee' honey bear is on every supermarket shelf. A more serious thought on the marginal value of foods arises when the author, or any other nutritional author touts a particular nutritional benefit, such as the anti-prostate cancer properties of lycopene found in both tomatoes and watermelon. As I am genetically predisposed to prostate cancer, I am inclined to wolf down as many tomato preparations as I can get my hands on. My problem is that this `hope' is probably pretty slim. Two portions of tomatoes a day for the rest of my life will probably change my chances by about 0.2%. I'm just guessing here, but I have a hunch that if someone ate a perfect diet according to these recommendation, the difference may still be too small to measure. This is why the author's negative comments about grains, milk, and soy are probably more valuable, as they warn us against things which we have for generations believed to be especially good for us.I found only one weakness in Dr. Bowden's facts, or at least in his completeness. In the article about cinnamon, he does not distinguish between true cinnamon (cinnamonum zelanicum) from Sri Lanka and it's close lookalike, cassia (Cinnamomum cassia) from China and southeast Asia. My hunch is that the good doctor was really talking about cassia. He would have removed a small blemish on his thoroughness if he would have distinguished the two. In general, he would have given a small bone to those of us who dote on such things if he were to have given the scientific names for all plant and animal food sources.Overall, this is a really good book on nutrition. Not because it's facts are better than those in many other books on nutrition, but rather because the cases for both good and bad foods are so eloquently and readably made. My two favorite facts are on the relative nutritional value of dandelion greens and lamb. Now dandelion should be no surprise, ALL green leaved vegetables are good for you. It's just that dandelion, like so many greens, is cheap. The good news about lamb, my very favorite meat, is based on the fact that sheep are grass fed, unlike cattle and pigs. And, if there is any one lesson we get from this book, our food sources, like us, are what they eat, and green grass is much better for Bo Peep's charges than corn or wheat.This is an excellent book of useable information on nutrition! I hope the author gets together with a strong culinary collaborator and turns all this information into a cookbook.

LOVE THIS BOOK!! It helped change my family’s eating lifestyle for the better and so educational. Have had it a long while now and it’s been SO helpful. It’s super easy (and fun) to read right thru and/or use as like a reference guide. Good imagery, well thought out layout and flow. Knowledge is power and it is very encouraging; when you read why this or this food is good for you (and tips on how to eat it and integrate it into your daily lifestyle with food) it really makes a difference and you tend to focus on all the GOOD stuff you can eat and WHY you’d want to eat it!! Very informative, interesting, and a staple now in our home. Love this author too, he’s got a great outlook on living a healthier life!!

This is one of three books that HAS actually changed the way I eat. I love this book because it does not give you lots of complicated recipes, or daily eating calculations or diet plans. It just tells you great foods to do with what you want.As a consequence I can simply add them to my eating plan in my own way. I never knew cabbage was so great, now I just buy it to add more to my salads. My kids always liked the ole "celery with penut butter" snack, but I never knew celery was so great. now celery is always available to them, and they eat more. I always add at least some red grapes and blueberries to my fruit smoothies. I now add spinach to ALL my salads, and was surprized how much my kids love spinach. My 8 yo son will eat spinach right out of the bag, plain!VERY ofter now, when my kids ask about a food item I will say "because it's one of the 150 best foods" OR my kids will ask me "is this one of the best 150?"While we will never eat all the foods in here, I definately try to make most of the foods I buy from this book. I switched using soy milk for my smoothies to coconut milk instead, for example.If anyone is interested, the other two books are "Green Smoothie Revolution" - I can't believe how good a smoothies can taste with spinach in it. And the other is "Eat to Live". Tone of informative info in there.Yes, me and my family DO still eat junk food too, but we eat MUCH better, and hopefully will keep improving. =D

I continue to be sceptical about any book that purposes to suggest the best foods to eat without consideration of how they are grown. Yes, that makes things very complicated. But it's rediculous to suggest that ANY blueberry, regardless of how old it is or where it's grown, is better than, say a fresh blackberry grown on mineralized soil. Despite the best efforts of agribusiness to make it appear that way, food is not a factory product. A carrot is not a carrot is not a carrot. They vary.Just once I'd like to see an acknowlegement that there are thousands of other healthy foods out there, and that each of us comes equipped at birth with a remarkably accurate "nutrition tester" - our mouths. High flavor usually = high nutritive value, once you rule out artificially contrived "high flavor" (processed snacks, hot dogs, etc.) Not always, but yes, usually. So pile on the herbs and eat it fresh-picked!