The New Optimum Nutrition Bible – by Patrick Holford

While the author is not “Dr. Patrick Holford”, it’s worth mentioning that he is a career nutritionist with half the alphabet after his name, and decades of experience in the field.

Next, before getting into the real review of the book, we’ll also mention that his career has not been without controversy, but this has mostly been when he has strayed out of his field, such as when he bought into the (since not only soundly refuted, but outright demonstrated to be fraudulent) claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

In this book, he focuses on nutrition, and as such, the only nutritional advice that hasn’t stood the test of time was that he errantly claimed vitamin C could outperform the antiviral drugs of the day in beating HIV (a claim that would have killed anyone with HIV who believed it and swapped their AVT for vitamin C).

But the rest? Honestly, he was prescient in many respects. Arguably, this meant he came to conclusions for which the science was quite new at the time of writing, so perhaps indicative of the same person who believed the aforementioned false claims, but fact is, there he was, in the 90s, arguing for what has since come to be known as nutritional psychiatry and is now backed by decades more science, as well as championing phytochemicals that back then were little-known and/or ignored, but that we now know to have very potent beneficial effects; he talked about antinutrients that hardly anyone was talking about then, and more and more and more.

Bottom line: 49 chapters, each on a different nutrition-related health topic, and one of them had an overly bold nutritional claim that didn’t stand the test of time? We think that’s pretty good.

Click here to check out The New Optimum Nutrition Bible, and see how comprehensive it is!