Kate Muir has made a career out of fighting for peri-menopausal health to be taken seriously. Because… it’s actually far more serious than most people know.

What people usually know:

• No more periods
• Hot flushes
• “I dunno, some annoying facial hairs maybe”

The reality encompasses a lot more, and Muir covers topics including:

• Workplace struggles (completely unnecessary ones)
• Changes to our sex life (not usually good ones, by default!)
• Relationship between menopause and breast cancer
• Relationship between menopause and Alzheimer’s

“Wait”, you say, “correlation is not causation, that last one’s just an age thing”, and that’d be true if it weren’t for the fact that receiving Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) or not is strongly correlated with avoiding Alzheimer’s or not.

The breast cancer thing is not to be downplayed either. Taking estrogen comes with a stated risk of breast cancer… But what they don’t tell you, is that for many people, not taking it comes with a higher risk of breast cancer (but that’s not the doctor’s problem, in that case). It’s one of those situations where fear of litigation can easily overrule good science.

This kind of thing, and much more, makes up a lot of the meat of this book.

Hormonal treatment for the menopause is often framed in the wider world as a whimsical luxury, not a serious matter of health…. If you’ve ever wondered whether you might want something different, something better, as part of your general menopause plan (you have a plan for this important stage of your life, right?), this is a powerful handbook for you.

Additionally, if (like many!) you justifiably fear your doctor may brush you off (or in the case of mood disorders, may try to satisfy you with antidepressants to treat the symptom, rather than HRT to treat the cause), this book will arm you as necessary to help you get what you need.

Grab your copy of “Everything You Need To Know About The Menopause” from Amazon today!

Indian food is wonderful—a subjective opinion perhaps, but a popular view, and one this reviewer certainly shares. And of course, cooking with plenty of vegetables and spices is a great way to get a lot of health benefits.

There are usually downsides though, such as that in a lot of Indian cookbooks, every second thing is deep-fried, and what’s not deep-fried contains an entire day or more’s saturated fat content in ghee, and a lot of sides have more than their fair share of sugar.

This book fixes all that, by offering 80 recipes that prioritize health without sacrificing flavor.

The recipes are, as the title suggests, vegetarian, though many are not vegan (yogurt and cheese featuring in many recipes). That said, even if you are vegan, it’s pretty easy to veganize those with the obvious plant-based substitutions. If you have soy yogurt and can whip up vegan paneer yourself (here’s our own recipe for that), you’re pretty much sorted.

The cookbook strikes a good balance of being neither complicated nor “did we really need a recipe for this?” basic, and delivers value in all of its recipes. The ingredients, often a worry for many Westerners, should be easily found if you have a well-stocked supermarket near you; there’s nothing obscure here.

Bottom line: if you’d like to cook more Indian food and want your food to be exciting without also making your blood pressure exciting, then this is an excellent book for keeping you well-nourished, body and soul.

Click here to check out Chetna’s Healthy Indian, and spice up your culinary repertoire!

There is a trend in psychology to “blame the parents” for “childhood trauma” that can result in problems later in life. Sometimes fairly, sometimes not. This book’s mostly not about that.

It does touch on our own childhood trauma, if applicable. But mostly, it’s about epigenetic trauma inheritance. In other words, not just trauma that’s passed on in terms of “the cycle of abuse”, but trauma that’s passed on in terms of “this generation experienced trauma x, developed trauma response y, encoded it epigenetically, and passed it on to their offspring”.

So, how does one heal from a trauma one never directly experienced, and just inherited the response to it? That’s what most of this book is about, after establishing how epigenetic trauma inheritance works.

The author, a therapist, provides practical advice for how to do the things that can be done to rewrite the epigenetic code we inherited. Better late than never!

Bottom line: it is well-established that trauma is inheritable. But unlike one’s eye color or the ability to smell asparagus metabolites in urine, we can rewrite epigenetic things, to a degree. This book explains how.

Click here to check out It Didn’t Start With You, and put things to rest!