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Dr Cate Shanahan's four book titles which one to read?
Which Book Should I Buy?
It depends on what you want.

I wrote Dark Calories, for health enthusiasts and health professionals including doctors, dietitians, NPs, PAs, nurses, chiropractors, trainers, and coaches. It’s a one-stop shop for everything you need to know to optimize your health–and your clients’. It pinpoints oxidative stress as the dominant root cause of all chronic diseases, accelerated aging, and metabolic dysfunction. It helps you understand why vegetable oils (The Hateful Eight) are the single most powerful oxidative stress and disease-inducing substance in the world’s food supply. It tells the forgotten history of how a corrupt medical organization aligned with the vegetable oil industry 70 years ago, and this powerful organization now controls what dietitians and doctors learn about fats. Once you learn how we’ve all been mislead, you will finally be able to make sense of conflicting expert opinions.

If you just want to lose weight, learn about metabolism, or reverse your diabetes, start with The FATBURN Fix. If just want to know what to buy to fight inflammation, then get Food Rules first. If you want to know the reasons why, or love science, enjoy history, or even if you believe nature has a kind of intelligence and want to deepen your appreciation, then read Deep Nutrition first. The three books are designed to complement each other and no matter which you read first, reading the others will give you new insights.

ONE LINERS to describe each book.

Deep Nutrition: Defines the human diet and how it supports human health, as well as what health truly is. Builds on the brilliant work of Dr. Weston A Price.

Food Rules: How to control inflammation with food and common meds you don’t need once you fix your diet.

Fatburn Fix: Defines metabolism as a network of 4 interconnected systems, and describes how oxidative stress disrupts the network and makes us insulin-resistant long before we gain weight. 

Dark Calories: The first book to clearly define junk food and processed foods so you can avoid them and discover exactly how they make you sick. 

 

Dark Calories (my newest book)

(Click here to buy on AMAZON)

Focuses on:

  • Ending the argument about which fats are good and bad once and for all.
  • What medical school should teach doctors, but doesn’t. To protect your health, you need to know this before you step into an examination room.
  • The multiple toxicities of the Hateful Eight bad oils.
  • The cellular root cause of ALL disease and death 
  • The truth about cholesterol
  • The real reason keto, carnivore, and low carb diets are reversing diseases and what kinds of carbohydrates actually help your health.

The FATBURN Fix 

(Click here to buy on AMAZON)

Focuses on:

  • Weight loss
  • How your metabolism works (and what foods and habits damage it)
  • How to assess the health of your metabolism
  • How to construct meals that heal your metabolism

The FATBURN Fix takes you along for a deep dive into the inner workings of your metabolism. It explores why we gain weight, whether calories matter or not, and how your metabolism affects your mood, your energy, and your risk of diseases. It talks about when calories matter and when they don’t. And most of all, it talks about how PUFA in our body fat interferes with our ability to burn body fat, thus turning your body fat from a source of energy on demand to an inflammation prone burden. More details about the book on The FATBURN Fix page of this website.

What’s the difference between The FATBURN Fix and Deep Nutrition? Deep Nutrition focuses on gaining health more than on losing weight. Deep Nutrition does not address the special problems that a person who struggles with weight must overcome. The FATBURN Fix heals your metabolism in a unique three-phase program that you customize based on your Fatburn Score.

Food Rules

(Click here to buy on AMAZON)

Food Rules provides you an extremely easy-to-read guide to ending your artificial dependence on prescription medication. The book is divided into four parts, the first three offering tips for healthiest shopping, cooking, and dietary balance, and the fourth a list of Doctor’s Orders designed to help you avoid overmedication, over-diagnosis, and over treatment for chronic health conditions that are reversible with diet.

Food Rules is not a rigid one-size-fits all dietary program but rather an instruction manual for everyone to teach you to make the healthiest possible choices, no matter what kinds of foods you enjoy most and no matter your medical conditions.

By following these rules, you will reduce the underlying inflammation generating metabolic imbalance we now know are the underlying reasons for most chronic medical problems including diabetes, depression,  cancer, food allergies, chronic pain, and more. The most essential rules are right upfront and if you can follow those you are halfway home!

Deep Nutrition

(Click here to buy on AMAZON)

We wrote Deep Nutrition to motivate people to make changes. We hope to inspire you, and we thought it would be most powerful, convincing, and interesting to bring the fullest possible picture of human health into view.

The first half of the book updates the works of men like Weston A Price and Frances Pottenger, who suggest that people living in self-sufficient cultures were able to provide their bodies with up to fifty times the amount of certain nutrients that the RDA currently recommends. This incredible nutrient density provided them with beautiful, strong physiques that, together with resistance to infectious disease, cancer, and many other aging-associated disorders, ensured they were built to last. Those who escaped accidents and other natural hazards lived long, healthy lives. Early chapters integrate the teachings of these brilliant men with new insights from the fields of genetics, biomathematics, sociology, nutrition, and obstetrics–to name a few.

The central theme of the book is that food is information. After establishing that the natural world is the ultimate source of our health, our aim with the central chapter,entitled The Four Pillars of World Cuisine is to help readers appreciate that the foods we chose to eat reflect our relationship with nature.

We hope to help health and culinary enthusiasts understand that our current terms for describing food (words like calories, protein, carbs, etc.) only tell part of the story. We also need to think more like a chef. Chefs consider the source of our food, the effects of time, cooking methods, and other factors that may diminish or enhance the flavor of the original ingredients. When our food is all natural, its flavor is an honest reflection of its value to our bodies.

The last half of the book provides the basic science information to back up some of the more controversial claims.

Chapter eight Good Fats and Bad is a must-read for anyone worried about cholesterol or heart health because it suggests, and cites literature to support, the idea that nature does not make bad fats and therefore we should return to traditional fats like butter and bacon grease and avoid the refined, novel oils now promoted by institutions like the American Dietetic Association and the government. Chapter nine Sickly Sweet is a must read for anyone with a sweet tooth or a carb addiction because it illustrates how sugar impacts your every cell, and help you identify hidden sources of sugar along with stories from my practice to highlight how high sugar diets can generate unusual symptoms that you may not realize are easily preventable–such as headaches, heart palpitations, and even elevated levels of LDL cholesterol. Chapter ten Beyond Calories discusses how fat cells are ready and waiting for the kind of diet and activities that will signal them to empty out their fat stores and even transform into other types of cells, most notably muscle and bone. And the final chapter Forever Young helps you to optimize your collagen, essential to healthy skin and joints.

 Of course, you don’t need to take our word for it! Take advantage of helpful reviews from Amazon

Please note: Please do not share personal medical information in a comment on our posts. It will be deleted due to HIPAA regulations.

This Post Has 11 Comments

  1. I am looking for your warm pumpkin pudding recipe that you mention in your books as being available on your website. (Jessie Waters mentioned your books on TV, so I bought them.)
    Could you please send the recipe it to me?
    Thank you so much,

  2. Most “vegetable” oils, are not derived from the plants, but rather, seeds from plants (sunflower, soy, corn, cotton, etc.), and the adulterated seeds, are bastardized by chemical processes and bleaching in order to create those lovely seed oils. Fruit-based oils (coconut, olive, avocado) are much healthier provided that they are not cut with seed oils in the process. Vegetables by and large (if not starchy, carb-loaded) are much healthier than grains. Healthiest, being water, and nutrient-dense, fatty, pasture-raised *grass-fed and grass-finished) animal meats and wild-caught fish.

  3. Not a expert by any means but as a lay person having read up on a few things I can best describe it as follows: Think of Wheat and what it goes through to become White fluffy bread that is cheap and nasty and not good to eat versus a sprouted wheat bread that uses only the sprouted wheat berry and some salt which is nutritionally good and tastes divine. Vegetables as in seeds (sunflower etc) suffer the same adulteration to become oil, lots of reading out there to get the full bottle on it. Don’t confuse fresh vegetables with vegetable oils they are completely and utterly worlds apart. Keep eating your veges!!

  4. I’m reading The FatBurn Fix now. I’m wondering why vegetables are the best thing to eat, but vegetable oils are bad.

    1. Vegetable Oils are concentrated PUFAs (bad). Also, veggies are not processed, vegetable oils are HIGHLY processed foods.

  5. I enjoyed the interview with Bill Maher. So much that I purchased your newest audio book. Passed it on to a RV forum as well. At 62, I need to change my diet. Starting to feel the effects that long term inflammation has on my body. Hope it’s not to late to change some bad habits.
    Wish Bill gave you more time but understand the time constraints of the show.

  6. Terrific interview on Bill Maher! I pride myself on my self care through nutrient dense, close to the ground (yet very delicious!) food. I’ve not before heard such definitive advice about oils and happy to need to dump only the grape seed oil I bought for high heat, ready to read next your article here on the topic of high heat cooking mythology. Look forward to Food Rules. I know the effort it takes to share one’s knowledge in print. Thank you for that endeavor. Next up: share your good work with all those I love.

  7. Hello Cate,

    I had the (serendipitous) pleasure of meeting your husband at the film festival yesterday. How fortunate we got to talking about my dog’s knee supplement! He generously gave me a copy of Food Rules and I’ve just finished devouring it. What a treat!

    I will email him a thank you next, but felt compelled to thank you directly as I fished around your website just now. (Sorry, the food references just keep coming…). I’m so curious to read the many other articles that relate to me.

    Thank you for taking the time to share your insight here and in your books, and in such an easy to ingest format. I’m confident that small, yet significant, changes (as I already abide by most of the rules) will lead to a permanent reduction in 12+ years of chronic back pain.

    Thank you, thank you.
    Melody

Note: Please do not share personal information with a medical question in our comment section. Comments containing this content will be deleted due to HIPAA regulations.

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