The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

Author: T. Colin Campbell, PhD and Thomas M. Campbell II

ISBN: 1932100660, 978-1932100662 Publisher: Benbella Books (2004)

What will it take for veggie stir-fry on rice to replace a beef burger on a bun as the all-American meal? A switch to a more plant-based diet has been standard dietary advice for years and the new Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report is no exception. In The China Study, however, the Campbells go much further, arguing that “a good diet is the most powerful weapon we have against disease and sickness” and that the healthiest diet is an entirely plant-based whole-food diet (no meat, dairy or eggs and little, if any, fish). A simple switch to such a diet, claim the Campbells, will dramatically decrease your risk of getting the diseases common in Western societies, including auto-immune diseases, cancer, heart disease and diabetes. As large-scale genetic screens to identify genes for these same diseases continue to fail, and as this failure looks to be permanent (see The Great DNA Data Deficit: Are Genes for Disease a Mirage?), this advice appears more and more prescient.

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The Unhealthy Truth: How our Food is Making us Sick and What We Can Do About It

Author: Robyn O’Brien (with Rachel Kranz)

ISBN: 978-0-7679-3071-0 Publisher: Broadway books (2009)

Allergies and food intolerances are serious medical conditions. They are the cause of many deaths and hospitalizations annually and they predispose to other illnesses. They can also exact a high toll in other ways since worry, inconvenience and lost opportunities can significantly harm the quality of lives.

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The No-Nonsense Guide to Science

Author: by Jerome Ravetz

ISBN: 1904456464 Publisher: New Internationalist Books (2006)

Traditional science as practiced in European and US universities is being confronted on many sides. These challenges are manifested in the rise of alternative medicine and patients groups, well-publicised failures and ethical lapses, criticism from environmental groups and declining student interest in many science subjects. To make matters worse, there is an increasingly cogent intellectual critique of scientific infallibility, objectivity and disinterestedness.

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Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA

Author: by Richard Lewontin

ISBN: 0140232192 Publisher: Penguin books (1991)

Biologists know that complex traits are typically associated with genetic variation between individuals. Nevertheless, if we hear on the news that obesity, antisocial behaviour or some other disorder has a strong genetic component, we are likely to attach special significance to this ‘fact’. We may be less likely to attribute social factors as a cause and we may be more likely to accept a technological or pharmaceutical solution as a remedy. The disorder may also acquire a credibility and a sense of inevitability that it previously lacked. The reasoning that leads to these conclusions has a certain logic, after all we investigate causes primarily so that we can find remedies, but nevertheless we need to be careful that our thinking is well-founded.

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Food is Different: Why we must get the WTO out of Agriculture

Author: Peter M Rosset

ISBN: 1552662012 Publisher: Zed books (2003)

Most people would probably agree that the world needs food and agricultural
systems that:
1) provide adequate, affordable, nutritious, tasty and culturally appropriate food,
2) offer rural people the opportunity for a living wage/income,
3) contribute to broad-based development and
4) conserve rural environments, cultural and culinary traditions

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The Killing of the Countryside

Author: by Graham Harvey

ISBN: 0099736616 Publisher: Vintage (1998)

Visitors to Britain are always being asked to admire the “unspoiled countryside” of a particular region, but landscapes are more than just photo opportunities. In only sixty years the British countryside has changed from being predominantly meadows and grasslands abundant with orchids and bees to virtual monocultures of rye grass whose wildlife is largely confined to clipped hedges and mown verges.

Many species of insects and flowers are all but extinct in Britain and the process continues. Today, the weed seed bank in farmed arable fields is estimated to be declining by approximately 3% per year. What has been lost and how we got here is the story of this book. Of all the ways that the UK landscape has been ‘spoiled’ , ugly development is perhaps the least of the villains.

The Unsettling of America

Author: Wendell Berry

ISBN: 0871568772 Publisher: Sierra Club books (1977)

In 2002, peasant associations from all over Asia organised an international scientific conference. The motivation for the conference was the fact that peasants and their leaders had no dialogue with agricultural scientists, either from their own countries or with those from abroad. A lack of support from scientists was not the only motivation however. The peasants had also come to believe that the science with which they were familiar was actively hostile to their way of life. As a result, many had demonstrated outside the UN-sponsored International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Phillipines, a research centre set up specifically to support farming in developing countries.

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The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Author: by Edward Hooper

ISBN: 0316371378 Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (2000)

If humans really did acquire HIV/AIDS from bushmeat, then how can one explain that the four known variants of HIV (three different types of HIV-1, plus HIV-2), each acquired independently, apparently originate from a very brief period in the history of human chimpanzee interaction? What happened in Africa in that period that might explain this remarkable coincidence?
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