Recommended Reading
Here you can find some of my favorite resources on everything from nutrition and cooking to wellness and my favorite sources of inspiration.
I hope you find something fun, interesting, or inspiring 🙂
Nutrition
- The China Study – This book is currently blowing my mind. It isn’t perfect. Nutrition studies rarely are able to prove anything conclusively simply due to the complex nature of nutrition and the difficulty of establishing causality in real-world settings among real human participants. However, Campbell provides an interesting case (and a mountain of well-cited evidence) for a plant-based diet. It’s a great place to start if you have ever wondered what benefits a plant-based diet offer. He discusses: links between dairy consumption and various forms of cancer; links between animal proteins and autoimmune disease; etc. It’s a fascinating read. (And, after you read it, you can go and find all the studies that critique it for a more complete picture. That’s what I plan to do).
- The Sprout Book – If you’ve ever wanted to up your nutrition intake, sprouts are your secret weapon. Doug Evans provides a great primer on how to eat them (with lots of recipes); how to grow them; and why you should eat as many sprouts as you possibly can. Interestingly, sprouts are also a great way to introduce incredibly nutrient-dense food into food deserts because they are very cheap; easy to grow at home; and provide many times the nutrients that fully grown vegetables provide. For areas where modern grocery supply chains fall short and people have a difficult time finding adequate nutrient-dense foods, sprouts are a very cool option.
- Rhonda Patrick Website & Youtube Channel – Rhonda produces amazing content both on Youtube and on her website. She distills nutrition-related research into more digestible formats.
Cooking
- The Vegetarian Flavor Bible – This is the ultimate guide for anyone who likes (or wants to get better at) getting creative in the kitchen! It’s a huge book that allows you to look up any ingredient and find a list of other ingredients that chefs believe pair well with it. It’s a great way to build your “cooking intuition.” I can’t recommend it enough.
Foraging
- Foraging the Rocky Mountains – This is a great resource we have recently started reading to teach ourselves to forage in one of our favorite states.
Wellness
- Ben Greenfield Fitness Website – Ben is a “bio-hacker” who runs an amazing website absolutely packed with resources on health, fitness, and longevity. He also has a podcast where he discusses topics ranging from spirituality to training schedules to productivity optimization to health and nutrition and supplementation. I love listening to this podcast on long runs. They keep me distracted, expand my horizons, and generally motivate me to be a better, more productive human.
- Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art – James Nestor’s incredible journalism on the history and science of breathing has transformed my understanding of the breath. It’s one of the best, most interesting, and most informative books I’ve ever read.
- Wim Hoff App – I really like the Wim Hoff app for simple breathwork exercises.
- How to Breathe Correctly for Optimal Health, Mood, Learning and Performace – A great podcast episode on the mechanics of breathing (as well as research-backed techniques for optimizing your breath in different scenarios) from Andrew Huberman at the Huberman Lab podcast.
Trail Running & Mountain Sports
- The Uphill Athlete – This website and the accompanying podcast are one of my favorite resources for trail-running specific information from a variety of coaches. They also have resources for ski-mountaineering, rock and alpine climbing etc. If you’re into that, I recommend checking it out.
Inspiration
- Jonna Jinton – Jonna’s Youtube Channel brings me so much peace and joy. She lives in Northern Sweden and makes beautiful videos of the nature around her.
- Peaceful Cuisine – Ryoya Takashima makes very beautiful, artistic, and meditative videos of cooking.
Other Interesting Reads
- Free: A Child and A Country at the End of History. This is an absolutely astonishing memoir by Lea Ypi about growing up in a socialist state and coming of age during the Albanian revolution. It’s a really interesting look at life under communism and a fascinating examination of the concept of freedom.
- From Warsaw with Love: Polish Spies, the CIA, and an Unlikely Alliance. If you enjoy a good non-fiction spy tale, this one is for you.