We’ve previously reviewed another of Dr. Fuhrman’s books, “Eat To Live”, and this time, he’s focusing specifically on preventing/reversing heart disease.

Dr. Fuhrman takes the stance that our food can either kill or heal us, and we get to choose which. As such, nutrition is central to his heart-healthy plan; he mostly leaves matters of exercise, sleep, etc to other sources.

His dietary approach is mostly uncontroversial: for example, advices include: enjoy nutritionally dense foods, skip processed foods, eat at least mostly plants, skip the added salt. A slightly more controversial aspect is that he advocates for avoiding cooking oils, including the healthiest oils, including olive and avocado, which are by current scientific consensus considered heart-healthy in moderation. As in, not even just heart-neutral, but rather, they actively improve triglycerides.

He compares different cardioprotective diets, and while he’s not unbiased, he does provide 40 pages of scholarly references, so we may understand that at the very least, his approach is sound.

There are also recipes—94 pages of them—for any who might wonder “how do I cook without…?” and some ingredient he would rather you omit.

The style is information-dense (and this is a 448-page book) but still very readable.

Bottom line: if you’re serious about improving your heart health, this book can help a lot with that.

Click here to check out The End Of Heart Disease, and end heart disease for yourself!

The book starts with an overview of inflammation, both acute and chronic, before diving into how to reduce the latter kind (acute inflammation being usually necessary and helpful, usually fighting disease rather than creating it).

The advice in the book is not just dietary, and covers lifestyle interventions too, including exercise etc—and how to strike the right balance, since the wrong kind of exercise or too much of it can sabotage our efforts. Similarly, Dr. Tidwell doesn’t just say such things as “manage stress” but also provides 10 ways of doing so, and so forth for other vectors of inflammation-control. She does cover dietary things as well though, including supplements where applicable, and the role of gut health, sleep, and other factors.

The style of the book is quite entry-level pop-science, designed to be readable and comprehensible to all, without unduly dumbing-down. In terms of hard science or jargon, there are 6 pages of bibliography and 3 pages of glossary, so it’s neither devoid of such nor overwhelmed by it.

Bottom line: if fighting inflammation is a priority for you, then this book is an excellent primer.

Click here to check out Calm Your Inflammation, and indeed calm your inflammation!

Maddy Dychtwald, herself 73, has spent her career working in the field of aging. She’s not a gerontologist or even a doctor, but she’s nevertheless been up-to-the-ears in the industry for decades, mostly as an organizer, strategist, facilitator, and so forth. As such, she’s had her finger on the pulse of the healthy longevity movement for a long time.

This book was written to address a problem, and the problem is: lifespan is increasing (especially for women), but healthspan has not been keeping up the pace.

In other words: people (especially women) are living longer, but often with more health problems along the way than before.

And mostly, it’s for lack of information (or sometimes: too much competing incorrect information).

Fortunately, information is something that a woman in Dychtwald’s position has an abundance of, because she has researchers and academics in many fields on speed-dial and happy to answer her questions (we get a lot of input from such experts throughout the book—which is why this book is so science-based, despite the author not being a scientist).

The book answers a lot of important questions beyond the obvious “what diet/exercise/sleep/supplements/etc are best for healthy aging” (spoiler: it’s quite consistent with the things we recommend here, because guess what, science is science), questions like how best to prepare for this that or the other, how to get a head start on preventative healthcare for some things, how to avoid being a burden to our families (one can argue that families are supposed to look after each other, but still, it’s a legitimate worry for many, and understandably so), and even how to balance the sometimes conflicting worlds of health and finances.

Unlike many authors, she also talks about the different kinds of aging, and tackles each of them separately and together. We love to see it!

Bottom line: this book is a very good one-stop-shop for all things healthy aging. It’s aimed squarely at women, but most advice goes for men the same too, aside from the section on hormones and such.

Click here to check out Ageless Aging, and plan your future!