As the title so directly suggests, this book is focused on maintaining your health. The first portion focuses on common and fatal diseases that inflict the human race, such as cancers and heart disease, and provides a realm of information on how one can help their body to deflect these specific ailments.

The later portion of this book centred around the foods touched on previously. An overview of a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, grains, lentils, nuts, and seeds was provided, with an additional explanation given as to the properties inside each one and just what made each an essential part of your daily nutritional intake. Easy recipes and inventive ways of adding these foods to your diet was an added bonus find, during this section.

I will disclaim that I only skimmed the first portion as it was the later that was of specific interest to me, at this time. I found much to take away from this, mainly being that it gave me a sound idea of just why each food focused on was so necessary. We all know broccoli is good for us, but does everyone know that you should wait 40 minutes between chopping and cooking fresh broccoli for the cancer-reducing enzyme inside it to be exposed? Or that adding another similar enzyme, such as mustard seed powder to cooked, frozen broccoli can also bring out the latent enzyme inside it? Because this was all certainly news to me!

This has already proven it will be a sound resource to refer back to and is a valuable asset to every individual. This seemed like information everyone should know and yet few rarely do. We take drugs to cure a whole host of ailments but this book has repetitiously proven that an outcome can be matched through the intake of fresh foods, at a fraction of the price and with no additional side-effects to be wary of.

'How Not to Die' by Michael Greger is the book that Big Pharma’s competition Big Broccoli would have written - if there was such a lobby group.
Michael Greger is a doctor that subscribes to the “let food be thy medicine” belief system. He believes in prevention and treatment of disease through plant based eating and he has a whole lot of research to back him up.
The first half of the book is broken into chapters that explain how not to die from heart disease, asthma, brain disease, diabetes, blood cancer etc. Each chapter includes studies that show how different vegetables mitigate that specific illness and how some animal products may make it worse.
Essentially a plant based diet is the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking. Broccoli and turmeric are wonder foods but purely by boosting daily fruit and vegetable intake we get a whole lot healthier. Fibre is essential not just for our gut but for our brain health and blueberries improve memory tasks while kiwifruit may help us sleep better.
The second half of the book details Greger’s Daily Dozen - fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, spices, beverages etc that we should consume every day. Turmeric and broccoli are on the list. He explains why they are brilliant for your body generally and includes studies on the benefits of each component of the list. For example - under the section Spice Mixes is a study that concludes “the incorporation of spices into the daily diet may help normalise postprandial disturbances in glucose and lipid homeostasis while enhancing antioxidant defence” These are not his words, in fact he clarifies what this means in general terms later. His style is much chattier and funnier.
The world of “nutrition” is a minefield of conflicting information and as a movement professional I have no remit at all to give advice yet am asked daily for it. I can now send people to Michael Greger’s website www.nutritionfacts.org and I have now subscribed to his podcast ‘nutrition facts’. He’s interesting, he’s engaging and he’s very persuasive.

This book is well written and explains quite complex health issues in easy to understand chapters. I wish I'd had a copy of this when I worked as a commissioner of health services in the NHS as it would have been quite useful for explaining the importance of funding certain services over others to those non-health professionals who held the purse strings! Some of the facts in the book are quite scary so this may not be suitable for those who are overly anxious or who tend to diagnose themselves with every ailment they come across. However, I do think this is a good shake down of exactly why increasing the amount of vegetable, fruit and unprocessed foods in your daily diet, and reducing your meat intake is so important.