What this is not: a book about one specific condition, injury, or surgery.

What this is: a guide to dealing with the common factors of many musculoskeletal conditions, inflammatory diseases, and their consequences.

Dr. Warner takes the opportunity to address the whole patient—presumably: the reader, though it could equally be a reader’s loved one, or even a reader’s patient, insofar as this book will probably be read by doctors also.

She takes an “inside-out and outside-in” approach; that is to say, addressing the problem from as many vectors as reasonably possible—including supplements, diet, dietary habits (things like intermittent fasting etc), exercise, and even sleep. And yes, she knows how difficult those latter items can be, and addresses them not merely with a “but it’s important” but also with practical advice.

As an orthopedic surgeon, she’s not a fan of surgery, and counsels the reader to avoid that if reasonably possible. She also talks about how many people in the US are encouraged to have MRI scans for financial reasons (as in, they can be profitable for the doctor/institution), and then any abnormality is used as justification for surgery, to backwards-justify the use of the MRI, even if the abnormality is not actually the cause of the pain.

Noteworthily, humans in general are a typically a pile of abnormalities in a trenchcoat. Our propensity to mutation has made us one of the most adaptable species on the planet, yet many would have us pretend that the insides of people look like they do in textbooks, or else are wrong. The reality is not so, and Dr. Warner rightly shows this for what it is.

Bottom line: if you or a loved one are suffering from, or at risk of, musculoskeletal and/or inflammatory conditions, this is a top-tier book for having a much easier time of it.

Click here to check out Bone on Bone, and suffer much less!

The core idea of this book is that foods can be assigned a numerical value according to their total nutritional value, and that this number can be used to guide a person’s diet such that we will eat, in aggregate, a diet that is more nutritious. So far, so simple.

What Dr. Ballantyne also does, besides explaining and illustrating this system (there are chapters explaining the calculation system, and appendices with values), is also going over what to consider important and what we can let slide, and what things we might need more of to address a wide assortment of potential health concerns. And yes, this is definitely a “positive diet” approach, i.e. it focuses on what to add in, not what to cut out.

The premise of the “positive diet” approach is simple, by the way: if we get a full set of good nutrients, we will be satisfied and not crave unhealthy food.

She also offers a lot of helpful “rules of thumb”, and provides a variety of cheat-sheets and suchlike to make things as easy as possible.

There’s also a recipes section! Though, it’s not huge and it’s probably not necessary, but it’s just one more “she’s thinking of everything” element.

Bottom line: if you’d like a single-volume “Bible of” nutrition-made-easy, this is a very usable tome.

Click here to check out Nutrivore, and start filling up your diet!

Cooking with a slow cooker is famously easy, but often we settle down on a few recipes and then don’t vary. This book brings a healthy dose of inspiration and variety.

The recipes themselves range from comfort food to fancy entertaining, pasta dishes to risottos, and even what the author categorizes as “fakeaways” (a play on the British English “takeaway”, cf. AmE “takeout”), so indulgent nights in have never been healthier!

For each recipe, you’ll see a nice simple clear layout of all you’d expect (ingredients, method, etc) plus calorie count, so that you can have a rough idea of how much food each meal is.

In terms of dietary restrictions you may have, there’s quite a variety here so it’ll be easy to find things for all needs, and in addition to that, optional substitutions are mostly quite straightforward too.

Bottom line: if you have a slow cooker but have been cooking only the same three things in it for the past ten years, this is the book to liven things up, while staying healthy!

Click here to check out Bored of Lunch: The Healthy Slow Cooker Book, and take the effort out of healthy cooking!